[coreboot] Coreboot wiki: what license is the content under?

[Sam Kuper]

On 03/04/2017, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could we, please, agree on what the question is; write the question; and
> ask a lawyer, preferably someone involved in the CC license creation in the
> first place? All this interpretation of legalese by coders is bound to end
> badly.

Here is the email I sent to Creative Commons. It is imperfect, but I
hope will be good enough.




Dear Creative Commons staff,


The coreboot project is discussing adopting a CC BY or CC BY-SA
license for its wiki content. A question arose about CC BY. Please can
you answer it? (For the source of the confusion, see the postscript to
this email.)

Suppose Alice publishes her work Alpha under CC BY 3.0.

Suppose Bob substantially adapts Alpha into the new work Beta that
bears his personality.

Assuming that wherever Bob publicly performs or distributes Beta, he
notes that it is based on Alpha by Alice that was licensed under CC BY
3.0: **can Bob offer the entire work Beta under CC0**?


Many thanks for your time,

Sam Kuper


P.S. The question seems to hinge on whether the sentence highlighted
with asterisks here in Wikipedia's definition of a derivative work is
correct: a "derivative work is an expressive creation that includes
major copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created
first work (the underlying work). **The derivative work becomes a
second, separate work independent in form from the first.** The
transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be
substantial and bear its author's personality to be original and thus
protected by copyright." (Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derivative_work&oldid=769964199
.)

It also hinges on how exactly to interpret the yellow box at the
intersection of the "BY" row and the "PD" column in the "Adapter's
license chart" at https://creativecommons.org/faq/ .