[cc-community] cc license use on participatory art sites, infringement and confusion
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Dec 4 07:56:10 EST 2006
Alek Tarkowski wrote:
> A friend of mine has sent me a link to a person complaining that a site
> called Buzznet allows people to upload works by others as their own, and
> on top of that mark them as CC licensed. The gist of the criticism is
> that though uploading somebody else's work is bad and immoral, at least
> uner normal copyright you do not make it easily available. So this is, I
> think, an important argument for us - that infringement with the later
> use of CC licenses is worse for the original artist than just infringement.
Well, it probably causes more confusion.
But of course a "license" granted by someone who has no rights in the
work isn't legally valid. Buzznet can say whatever they like in their
usage agreement, but they actually are liable for copyright
infringements when they make them (you aren't signatory to that
agreement, anyway!) So, if someone illegally posts a work and claims it
under a CC license, that doesn't actually mean it *is* under a CC
license, so the fear that people who download the work and use it
according to the terms of that license are legally entitled to, is not
founded (CC licensing may increase the probability of such behavior, but
users do have some obligation to use a little common sense).
I have, in a similar vein, seen GPL or CC licensed KDE or Gnome themes
which are based on licensed anime characters or other copyrighted and/or
trademarked artwork. Clearly those are not actually legal, whatever the
uploader may have thought.
There's a *lot* of bad attribution and infringement on the web, whether
for CC licensed material or ARR.
Of course, IANAL, but this part seems fairly clearcut to me.
> I write about this for two reasons. Firstly, I am a bit shocked by how
> this person, clearly knowledgeable just a bit about copyrights, gets
> confused about CC - at some point s/he mentions a license called "Common
> Creative - Paternity 0.1" - no idea what that's supposed to be.
It must be the "Creative Commons Attribution 1.0" license. Possibly
minced by multiple translation?
> So I think CC needs to really work with platforms that offer CC
> licensing in the interface.
How exactly? Are you imagining some kind of certification process to
recognize when a CC licensing interface is sufficiently clear? Political
action/pressure? Angry letters? :-)
Sounds like something that might be interesting to explore further, but
it needs specifics.
> Otherwise we might reach a point where CC is recognized as "something to
> do", the license use counter will be ticking like crazy, but the whole
> pool of works will be slightly spoiled, not a good situation. I think
> education needs to be tightly coupled with technical means (as always!!).
Agreed.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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