I am not a lawyer but my understanding is that the consequence is that a conversion to a codec that does not allow for commercial use like the MPEG does, is not allowed under the CC-by-sa license.
Facebook intends to host Wikipedia content and consequently it will have to deal with this. It will be interesting to learn how they will twist and turn in order to deal with this issue.
Thanks,
GerardM
1 comment:
Freedomdefined.org indeed does include this requirement in their definitions. As far as I am aware however, the Creative Commons licenses limit their reach specifically to the copyright of the content. The CC-by-sa-3.0 legalcode doesn't even make a reference to patents for instance.
The reason for this is quit clear. Patent law is somewhat of a minefield, especially because many of these patents that relate to codecs and formats in particular are software patents, which are not only not even recognized in most countries in the world, they are even somewhat disputed in the US. Thus it seems that Creative Commons is avoiding the issue by specifically dealing with the content. So your content is free, no matter what format you put it in. You might have to pay to use that format, but that doesn't limit in what you can do and are allowed to do with the licensed content. No matter what.
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