Admittedly, it sucks at the moment, but I’ve written out a rough draft of the Free Animation License.
Have a looksee; it will certainly change with further additions.
Also, this is meant to cover any imagery that may be used in an animation or slideshow, hence the inclusion of several different image media. However, I especially intend this to be used for SVG animations, since such animations are completely text-based and text-editable (in other words, you should pull up an SVG file like this and open up the “Page Source” window for it in either Firefox or Opera).
In other words, this license is meant to be more like a combination of the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL, used for text publications, especially Wikipedia) and the Free Art license when applied to text-based graphic animation (2D or 3D), and less like any of the Creative Commons licenses, which have found greater exposure as licenses of choice for those who want free publicity for, I guess you could call it, “binary media”, or media that is processed and manipulated by the machine (most music and graphics files) rather than by text (anything XML based).
Wow, seems awful hard on fair use stuff. Fair use is almost unavoidable in any serious work; a quote, or the outside of a building in a country that doesn’t have freedom of panorama often is a legitimate addition. Even if the work is original, the credits usually have the copyrighted logo of organizations that contributed to or endorse the work.
The harshness on fair use is due to the legal tightening of the noose on its neck. Based upon this post, I find myself to lean more towards the “Commons” side, which seeks to explicitly extricate media (from the get-go) from artificial restrictions (for the record, this comment on the deletion of CC-by-SA-licensed videos due to the mere capture of a Google logo in the videos kinda set that mood about fair use for me). This way, I’m supposing, the Commons-licensed media and media repositories can avoid the the threats of litigation that corporations are more than happy to dispense concerning their brands, copyrights and trademarks.
This, of course, is opposed to the Piracy rights side of the argument, which is currently helping fight for the life of fair use in the courts. Such a fight is probably the only remaining bastion of the piracy rights activists and concerned parties due to the already-toxic atmosphere that prevails here in the U.S. concerning intellectual property; this atmosphere (artificially and superficially) protects the corporate distributors and owners and endangers everyone else, from the pirates to mere users of songs by Prince.
I would like to see the pirates here in the U.S. fight back and re-gray the intellectual property arena so that such features as “fair use” are protected for future utilization, but I think that the free/open media content licenses that currently exist need to arm the content to the teeth and set some borders – no – wired fences around them. Then the pirates will know where the Commons is entrenched and from where the oncoming corporate bodies are raiding, and will be compelled to make new strategies to beat the corporations back.
I may add a few caveats for copyrighted panorama that is given permission to photograph or visually depict in a recognizable manner by the owner(s) of the included building or work, but the copyrighted logo inclusion thing sounds a bit like the advertising clause in the earlier BSD licenses.
Thanks for your explanation. That’s certainly something to think about. My gut feeling would have been to maybe not even mention it, since fair use varies from country to country. Anyone who can’t have fair use material in theirs is free to remove it. But I’ll admit I haven’t thought out all the possible consequences of that.