Question about CC licenses
3 votes c/freepost Posted by zPlus — 3 votes, 7 commentsSource

I’ve just found this on the SuperTuxKart website

Licenses that can be used as a base for derivative works : CC-BY 2.0 / 2.5, CC-BY-SA 2.0 / 2.5. If you find an image released under this license, it is NOT acceptable to use this image directly in your work, however you are allowed to make a significant modification to it (for instance crop it and make it repeatable to build a texture) then you are allowed to release your modified version of the image under the same license, version 3.0, which is accepted. What constitutes a significant modification is open for lawyers to debate upon but as long as your modified version does not look like a copy of the original we won’t be picky.

Can somebody please help me understand why “it is NOT acceptable to use this image directly in your work”? As long as I give attribution to the original author the license terms should be satisfied. What am I missing here?

I add an question: Why only 2.0 when 4.0 is the most recent one?

Good question. I think it’s just the website that is outdated. If you notice they write “CC-BY 2.0 / 2.5, CC-BY-SA 2.0 / 2.5” and below in the same paragraph “under the same license, version 3.0”. So it’s either a typo or simply not updated.
On the same webpage they also write

These licenses are acceptable : CC-BY 3.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0, GPL, LGPL, Apache License, Mozilla License, Artistic, MIT, BSD License, X11 license, CC0 (Public Domain)

Are you contributing or otherwise in contact with the project (Super Tux Kart)? If so, you could inform them about the new version of CC, which is also linked here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ccby

edit: There was then an typo on your side, leaving out the 3.0+

Nope, I’m not involved in the development of SuperTuxKart.

There was then an typo on your side, leaving out the 3.0+

Sorry but, I can’t find where it’s written “3.0+”. Literally there is no “+” sign anywhere on the page =)

Apparently not, sorry.
They are at still at 3.0 and not 4.0

So it’s either a typo or simply not updated

No idea, how you could you come to such a conclusion. It’s written absolutely clear even to me: works under CC BY-(SA) 3.0+ licences are acceptable, works under older CC BY-(SA) licences (i. e. 2.0 and 2.5) are not acceptable directly.

That is pretty logical since older CC BY-(SA) licenses are somewhat non-free.

As for ‘directly’, the point is that unlike well-known GNU licences, that leave it up to copyright holder, whether to allow redistribution under their later versions or not, Creative Commons licences leaves you no choice other that to trust the Creative Commons Corporation and to allow (at least) redistribution of any work that is derived / ‘adapted’ from yours under the terms of any later version of respective CC licence.

Just to be clear: works under ‘CC BY-(SA) version 2.0 or (at your option) any later version as published by Creative Commons Corporation’ should be absolutely okay.

Alas, Creative Commons done nothing to promote such a manner of licensing, instead they impose another that both inconvenient for a honest re-using and does not protect against any hypothetical malicious aims.