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Virality of Creative Commons "Share-Alike" licenses?

I've been discussing the implications of the "Share-Alike" clause in Creative Commons licenses - would welcome advice!

My original FB post

Is it really as viral as it sounds? Does "based upon" mean that if someone uses a beating heart shader element with CC BY-SA in a Touchgram that the composed message is therefore all CC BY-SA? So if the recipient wants to reuse a page, it is CC BY-SA?

Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material

Say it's two pages, with a beating heart shader on one page, text, images, sounds and touch sensors on both. Is that shader part of a collection or is the entire work an adaption of the shader?

Another analogy would be if you had a website that supported Flash (or modern WebAssembly compiled code) and on your page you had an animation that was GPL-licensed. Does that GPL license for that component mean your entire page should become GPL?

Update
(was initially just a comment below but wanted to ensure people read it with the original text).

Based on initial feedback, reading about https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_interpretation it seems likely our use falls into the category Simply including an SA work unmodified alongside unrelated materials does not produce an adaptation

Your messages that use that shader as a component alongside other unrelated items will not be virally affected.

Our trivial mods to make the shader run in SpriteKit rather than ShaderToy, must be published as open source. They will appear on GitHub

That seems to be compatible with the definition of Share

Share means to provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.

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    CC-by-SA is a completely worthless and untrustworthy license that can only realistically be used by websites or news outlets.

    It is a deceptive license in that the creators should just put a 'non-commercial' option on the license and be done with it, because, in effect, that is what the license amounts to - BUT a layperson using the work may not realise it until they've already incorporated the CC-by-SA material into their own creation, and lost all their effort.

    A deceptive and utterly bad license.

    I saw a poor fellow asking about this on the internet AFTER incorporating a CC-by-SA image into his graphical art creation. Bang goes his trouble, because he now cannot really distribute his work commercially. Yes, yes, he can, and the customer can then put that work all over the net, legally.

    A mindlessly stupid license. Ambiguous as hell, and therefore, worthless.

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    First things first, always read and understand the licenses, agreements, and contracts that you consider relying on. If they were written by lawyers, they define their terms, specifically so that there is no confusion; if it doesn't define terms, you probably shouldn't trust it, because there's probably enough wiggle room for a creator to say "I meant something else" and take you to court. Likewise, keep in mind that "some person on the Internet" probably isn't a lawyer, and definitely isn't your lawyer, so any advice or analysis that you get here will be worth what you paid for it, minus some overhead...

    That said, my expectation--as someone who releases a fair amount of material under licenses with various reciprocation terms--is that following those terms represents my "payment" (the legal term would be "consideration") in exchange for making the material available to the people who want it. Just like if I charged money, it makes less sense to ask if there's a way to slip by without paying than it is to just decide if the cost is worthwhile to your plans.

    I feel like I should probably also point out that licenses like versions and variants of Creative Commons and the GPL are public licenses, the terms of use that some random creep off the street gets. If you want to offer money for different terms, most creators are going to be OK with that for the right price, as long as you understand that nobody's license can be revoked and that they might have better things to do. It's also worth pointing out that you don't have any obligation to use anything, if the terms make you uncomfortable: I use reciprocal licenses partly because they scare away people who want to permanently drag my work behind a paywall. As an example (of both issues), I released a novel under a CC-BY-SA license; if someone (somehow) wants to adapt it into a movie, either they need to be willing to credit me and release it under the same terms as the book or they need to come up with a price where I'm willing to let them release their movie without sharing. I mean, if someone is worried about someone exploiting their work without giving back, why would I help them do that to me!?

    It's before I put any serious work into correcting typos and I should probably rectify that soon, but if you're interested in seeing the reasoning that took me from "I would never release anything that wasn't either completely proprietary or in the public domain" to "share-alike makes the world go around," one of my first blog posts goes into exactly that, and touches on a few other issues that I mentioned above.

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      And to hϵll with your stᵾpid 'this is my payment' nonsense. Really. If you want to make a thing non-commercial, put in a blᴓᴓdy non-commercial clause. If you want to allow commercial use, put in a commercial clause. Don't dither in-between.

      A graphics specialist who uses CC-by-SA is doomed to making ONLY ONE SALE commerically, after which his customer can spread the work ALL OVER THE INTERNET for free!

      The CC-by-SA is a license written for software code that COMPLETELY IGNORES the implications of the license in other fields - like graphics.

      HORRIBLY AMBIGUOUS

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      I liked your piece but disagree a bit on motivation for using GPL or not.

      I decided to release much of my work without GPL, using either MPL or MIT licenses, because I wanted people to be free to reuse it widely. That's not the hope for widespread adoption by large companies that you cite. It's enabling a lot of smaller indies to be free to use my work.

      GPL was a barrier to reuse in most projects, especially any commercial or government work.

      As a result of my report-writer being under MPL, I have been paid twice by businesses to extend it and we were able to use it in a scientific programming job I had at CSIRO. If it had been GPL, it would have been rejected by all three.

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        And if you paid for commercials during popular sporting events, you might have gotten more consulting gigs. And if you lowered your consulting rate to zero, you'd get plenty more work. Not all opportunities are worth the cost to get them, and "do things for free" is almost never a worthwhile way to get a payout for things, in my experience.

        But you'll notice how your question, and now your response, shows that you're just looking for free labor to exploit, seeming actually offended by anyone who doesn't want to donate labor to you. So, I'd strongly recommend sticking to the "liberal" licenses and stay away from anything with a reciprocal clause, since you clearly don't think that's worth the cost.

        Trying to slip through the cracks is only going to generate ill will. Trying to compare being asked to pay for something with your labor with a pandemic doesn't make you look any smarter than Steve Ballmer calling Linux a "cancer."

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          you'll notice how your question, and now your response, shows that you're just looking for free labor to exploit, seeming actually offended by anyone who doesn't want to donate labor to you.

          Where did this offensive take come from?

          Seriously, what about my question made you think I was trying to exploit people? What about my answer saying I've used alternatives to GPL to make my stuff more widely available made you think I was exploitative?

          Just to clarify things, I'm working on a creative app. It lets you create interactive experiences and I'm encouraging a mixer/maker culture in which people who receive a cool message can reuse portions and extend it.

          There is also an associated marketplace I'm building which will allow people to publish things for free or set prices. I'm putting a lot of work into ensuring that artists' credits are preserved and licenses of different kinds are obeyed.

          Some of the material I've already used in demonstrations is available under CC-BY-SA. I wanted to make sure that if someone uses that material that they aren't incurring surprising restrictions on their work.

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            Sigh...Don't be a baby. I'm not "offended." You shifted immediately from "someone help me understand this" to trying to inform me that I'm doing the wrong thing by denying you and other companies the use of my blog and code. There is no interpretation other than you want everybody to work for free on your terms. This is an attempt to scare people away from using licenses that ask you to be a part of the community. You might prefer it if I used some polite euphemism like "copyleft labor disruption engineer," instead, but I don't think that's my problem.

            I mean, you just said it yourself: You want to sell or give away the rights to works that you have not been given, and want to "make sure" it's OK. It isn't. The share-alike clause is payment for permission to use the work. The price doesn't change because you think you have a clever business plan. Pushing back when people give you an answer that you don't want to hear isn't going to change the price, either.

            If there's any offense, it's that you keep trying to convince me that you have some magic loophole that'll let you not care about licensing, with arguments that were tired in the 1990s.

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              Thanks for pushing me to re-read the original document more carefully and thus being able to relax that I am indeed complying with the language and intent of the license.

              If they were written by lawyers, they define their terms, specifically so that there is no confusion

              One of the major activities of the courts is arguing the meaning of contracts written by lawyers. I have friends who are lawyers and have worked for multiple legal clients. Legal terms are as bug-free as software programs.

              I'm sorry you live in a world where you so readily jump to the worst possible interpretation of people. If you re-read my posts, I don't think I ever said you were doing the wrong thing. I talked about my reasons for not using GPL. I still find it offensive when you wrote just said it yourself and then go on to describe things that I did not say.

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          I just realised that one of the things @jcolag is possibly complaining about is my use of the term "viral".

          I apologise to anyone I have offended by using that adjective. I have been referring to GPL as "viral" for ohhh, probably close to 30 years. Is there an alternative term being suggested?

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license

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    If you don't want to dive into the FB thread, one point discussed is how https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_interpretation tries to clarify the issue Simply including an SA work unmodified alongside unrelated materials does not produce an adaptation

    That suggests to me that I have an obligation to share the ported shader source code (trivial changes to make it work in SpriteKit rather than ShaderToy) but that the shader license won't affect the entire work.

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