[cc-community] Changing the law to support CC

Gavin Baker gavin at gavinbaker.com
Fri Apr 18 19:02:57 EDT 2008


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I am sure this conversation has been had before, but regardless:

In a discussion on cc-licenses (below), some comments have been made
that the latest draft of CC0 is incompatible with the law in some countries.

Has there been any discussion about working with legislators to change
the law in countries with legal systems that (for instance) make an
approach like CC0 difficult?

I think we can make a strong argument that, in the case of science,
there is a stronger public interest in promoting unrestricted data
sharing than in protecting whatever the author's moral rights might be
- -- at least in the case where the author WANTS to waive her rights.

I know that doesn't help with forming the license now, but I just wonder.

John Hendrik Weitzmann wrote:
| Hi,
|
| I can confirm for Germany basically all Gisle said for Norway.
|
| Something I just posted on the cc-europe list:
|
| The only possible solution under monistic systems with strong moral
| rights would probably be an assertion to never claim and enforce any
| unwaivable right in the work. But courts won't be readily willing to
| uphold such an auxilliary construction designed to circumvene
| non-dispositive law.
|
| And (bad for Larry) we might have to get into the messiness of
| contractual relations again, as with the licenses. Or rely on bona fide,
| which is even worse.
|
| @Mike: Can CC0 as a construct live with "worth a try (but might turn out
| not to work)"?
|
| all the best,
| John
|
|
|
| Gisle Hannemyr schrieb:
|> Mike Linksvayer wrote:
|>> See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8211 for announcement,
|>> feedback encouraged on this list.
|>> - CC0 waiver legalcode
|>>   http://labs.creativecommons.org/licenses/zero/1.0/legalcode
|> I do not think that the text of the beta CC0 waiver will have any
|> legal effect in most countries in Europe.  I am certain that this
|> will not fly in Norway.
|>
|> You just can't waive moral rights in Norway (the law is very clear
|> on that point).  But that's a mere technicality.  Even if you
|> can't waive moral rights, if you think you can, you will probably
|> not create too much of a stink when someone violates them.
|>
|> But in the legal code, the author waives a lot of other rights:
|> "privacy rights, rights protecting against unfair competition
|> and any rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse
|> of data" without as much as pausing  to establish that the author
|> has those rights in the first place.
|>
|> Take a photograph for instance. In Norway a photograph depicting
|> a person is considered personal data and covered by the data
|> protection act.  The privacy rights attached to that data
|> belongs to the depicted person, not the author.  This goes for
|> a number of other data as well.  You simply can't release
|> personal data into the public domain in Norway, so making the
|> waiver apply to data bases open up a whole can of worms as to
|> who controls the right to the data in the data base (in many
|> cases, it is not the author).
|>
|> I am afraid that releasing something like this on the general
|> public is not a good idea.  People using CC-licenses are not
|> legal experts and the CC0 legalcode has the potential to
|> create a huge mess if someone without the legal expertise
|> starts using it to waive rights that they he not posess in
|> the first place.
|
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| http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses

- --
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is
always a vice.
~    Thomas Paine
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