No Derivative Works

Authors Jason Self

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jxself.org

No Derivative Works Home

A discussion on IRC inspired me to write about the problems with licenses that do not Linux-libre
allow derivative works.

The primary reason for allowing derivative works is because creative works contribute GitWeb
to our shared history and culture and rightly belong to the people of the world once
published. There's a whole separate argument to be made there, which I won't do How To
here. I'll just address the point that was raised in support of not allowing derivative
works: Avoiding misrepresentation. The idea is that, if people can't change what you Articles
wrote, they can't make it seem like you're saying something different. This argument
quickly falls apart when you examine it. RSS Feed
This is because the license can only regulate stuff beyond what the law already
allows. Keep in mind regardless of that a license says, people don't have to accept it About Me
and can instead simply treat the work as if it was under normal copyright. Quoting
people and re-using portions is already allowed as a fair use exception to copyright in Contact Me
the U.S. and in the various laws of other countries around the world. As long as
people are able to quote you and re-use small snippets legally without accepting the GPL enforced
license then the potential for being quoted out of context, being made to seemingly
say something else, and such will still exist regardless of the license.
If you appreciate any of the things I
In fact, CC BY and CC BY-SA do a better job of addressing the concern over am doing you can make a donation.
misrepresentation because they require that modified versions be clearly marked as
such so as to avoid attributing someone else's changes to the original author. That
automatically prevents someone from modifying the document and then claiming it's
what the original author said. (And if someone is concerned that someone won't follow
the license and clearly mark it as having been modified then what makes them think
that they're going to follow the ND license either?)

Another thing is that CC BY and CC BY-SA both include a provision that the copyright
holder can contact someone and have the attribution removed (see section 3.a.3 in
version 4.0 of both CC BY and CC BY-SA.) So if the author didn't like the modified
version so much that they wanted their name off of it, they can invoke that clause to
have the attribution removed.

Not only does ND not address the stated concerns, it also prevents uses that the
original author might want to allow, such as translations. Yes, someone could contact
the author to ask for permission to make a translation (aka a "derivative work") but this
works only so long as they're both alive and contactable. It quickly falls apart once
either of those two things change. This also contributes to "permission culture." This
culture of permission is why orphan works, for example, are a problem where you
can't find the copyright holder or their heir to get that needed permission from.

It's far simpler to grant that permission upfront, especially since licenses that do not
allow derivative works do not really address the stated concern of misrepresentation.