Let's say that Alice makes a video and releases it under the CC-BY-ND license. Bob now wants to use a still frame from the video in his work (maybe to showcase or aggregate thumbnails of Creative Commons videos). Multiple places on the Creative Commons website, including the license deed for CC-BY-ND and their FAQ, emphasize that:
Merely changing the format never creates a derivative.
and
All CC licenses allow the user to exercise the rights permitted under the license in any format or medium.
This suggests that changing a MP4 file to, say, an AVI file is not considered an adaptation. However, taking a still frame from a video seems a bit unclear. On one hand, it could be interpreted as "converting" the file from one format to another (for example from MP4 to GIF) and it would not be an adaptation. On the other hand, the use could be considered "transformative" and therefore a derivative work since Bob chose a still frame that represented the whole video (or another way to think of it is that he "cropped" all the other frames of the video out and therefore modified the video, which would then make it a derivative work). Here are my questions:
- Is Bob's usage considered a derivative work under US copyright law?
- Is Bob's usage considered an "adaptation" under the CC-BY-ND license? If it makes any difference, let's say that Alice has licensed her work under the 4.0 version of the license.