[cc-community] Relicensing after cc-by-2.0 licence breach

Paul Dixon paul at elphin.com
Wed Feb 28 17:21:27 EST 2007


The short version: If I breach the CC licence terms, can I simply 
re-licence the work by bringing myself back into compliance, or have I 
rendered myself permanently unable to use that work?

Here's the story that lead to that question:

I help to run www.geograph.org.ok, a growing archive of 300,000+ CC 
licenced photos of the UK and Ireland. We ask all contributors to adopt 
a cc-by-sa 2.0 licence on their submissions.

A photo contributor changed their attribution credit from their name to 
"All Rights Reserved" which naturally confused site visitors and in 
particular, users of our image feeds. We assumed the contributor now 
wished to have their attribution removed, and so changed the attribution 
to "uncredited".

This was an unfortunate error on our part, and when it was brought to my 
attention by the contributor I immediately restored the original credit.

However, the contributor now asserts we have breached the licence and 
must remove his photographs. My counterclaim is the works are 
permanently available to anyone who wishes to comply with their terms. 
By restoring the credit, we have, in effect, simply re-licenced the 
works from the global pool of CC works.

I'm pretty sure I'm right, but happy to hear confirmation either way....


Paul Dixon
Geograph Project



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