[cc-community] avoiding the CC licensing path by rights users
Gavin Baker
gavin at gavinbaker.com
Thu Apr 10 14:11:22 EDT 2008
On Thu, April 10, 2008 1:51 pm, jonathon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Alek Tarkowski wrote:
>
>> In short, the editors avoided the CC licensing path. There are two
>> possibilites:
>> a) they did not notice / know about it - CC markings at Flickr are
>> notoriously small and there is no clear information / explanation of
>> what they mean
>> b) they did not consider this path sufficiently secure
>
> c) Due Diligence. They are verifying that they can use the work that
> they want to use. A random photograph on a random website using a
> random license grants users nothing. (Even if the meta data contains
> the license terms, they would still have to do this. Metadata can be
> removed or added by third parties.)
But it sounds like they're not confirming the CC license, but detouring
around it. They're asking for permission separate from and regardless of
the CC license. Of course, this is a rather specific detail and it may
have been lost in translation.
But, regardless of this particular case, there are users who do it: who
ask for permission separate from and regardless of the CC license. That's
not due diligence; rather, it's a case of either not understanding the CC
license, or of using the routine workflow (boilerplate permissions grant)
and ignoring the CC license. It could also be that the user has more faith
in the validity / defensibility of their own license than in CC's (if
something goes wrong, the worker in the permissions department will be
better served by saying "but I used the standard form" than if their
defense is "I thought CC would be OK").
As a community, I think we should make the case that due diligence is
confirming the work's ownership and the validity of the CC license, not
seeking a separate license. This is important both to promoting CC
licenses (users understand the licenses by seeing them in action) and to
defending the public impression of the validity of the licenses.
I might suggest, then, that someone (CC's GC?) write a boilerplate form
for this purpose (and, preferably, a Web interface). This would allow a
licensee to quickly generate a form requesting the licensor to confirm
that they licensed the work and that they had the right to do so. You
could see this as the licensee-side complement to Registered Commons
<http://registeredcommons.org/> -- perhaps it could even output there.
I suppose this might be seen as undercutting the purpose of the CC
licenses, which is to remove the guesswork from getting permissions, but
we know this is more myth than reality. Anybody can paste a license on any
given work; users are reasonable to want to confirm that the license is
legitimate and authorized. A little boilerplate could go a long way toward
that end, and help prevent this kind of end-run around the license we see
here.
--
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com
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