Works within Works, and Collections

One of the repercussions of the information revolution is a high-speed, high-energy barrage of texts that we navigate with a kind of vertiginous glee.  This is nothing new because it is inescapable.

From a licensing standpoint (not to mention a textual one), we often have to decode collections of communicated texts in order to figure out what is what, exactly.  For example, when we view most commercial websites, we see their own content, which might be original and might be embedded, as well as advertisements.  Should we accept it all as one "thing?"  No.  The ads, at least, are surely the copyrighted work of a separate agency or company.

Consider, then, an electronic presentation (a .pptx file, for example).  In the file there are several slides containing nothing but original text, but there are also slides containing images which are all appropriately cited but CC-licensed in different ways.  Do we consider this presentation a singular work, several different works, or a collection containing individual works?

Byte: Creative Commons suggests Links to an external site. that we differentiate "works" from "collections" or "collective works" in their FAQ section.  "Works" are individual, sovereign objects with a license.  "Collections" or "collective works" can contain any number of works (as well as original content) and are licensed separately from the works that they contain.

Keep in mind the crucial details here:

• The work as a whole (the presentation) is CC BY, as is, automatically, all of its content but what is otherwise noted.
• The smaller works (the images) are all separately licensed, and included in the presentation.  This means that they must each have been licensed no more strictly than the collection or else the collection's license isn't valid.  The presentation claims that it can be reproduced, modified, and sold with attribution.  However, if one of the images within the presentation forbids, say, modification and sale, then the presentation can't be reproduced, modified, and sold with attribution.

We'll discuss this in a bit more detail later, but it is important to keep in mind that it's vital to make sure that images, blocks of text, videos, or sounds in a larger work share the licensing attributes of that larger work.

Read again the Creative Commons explanation of this on their FAQ Links to an external site..