[cc-community] Copyright enforcement and CC BY-NC licenses
Fred Benenson
fred.benenson at gmail.com
Sat Aug 2 12:40:45 EDT 2008
On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 5:56 AM, drew Roberts <zotz at 100jamz.com> wrote:
> So, this is an odd question I thought of the other day while I was thinking
> of
> other angles that I hope to remember and post about as well. (I think one
> was
> re BY-NC-SA (hey Greg!)
>
> So, you build on a BY-NC work and register your copyright. You license your
> new work also BY-NC.
>
> Someone violates the copyright on your work. You sue. You are entitled to
> statutory damages right? You collect. Are you now guiilty of violating the
> NC
> licneses of the works yours built upon?
>
> Is that train of thought clear?
>
> all the best,
>
> drew
To me there are two questions here.
One is: Does a lawsuit (including punitive damages) settlement constitute
"commercial" gain such that it would violate an upstream NC license?
IANAL, but the only interpretation in which a settlement would constitute
commercial gain is in a very narrow, and perhaps conspiratorial view of how
corporations use "intellectual property" to gain commercial advantage over
their competitors (submarine patents were mentioned, but there are other
cases involving what could be considered submarine copyrights).
Even granting these cases as commercial, I still think that the most
conservative conclusion would be that it "depends" on the circumstances of
the case.
Other than that, would we really want a hard and fast rule of whether a
lawsuit plaintiff's suit should be considered commercial? It seems to me in
contrast to the delibatory nature of the coruts.
Second question, however, relating to the nature of downstream violations --
What is the difference between a NC violation and a BY-SA situation where
someone downstream (let's say 8 generation after the first BY-SA work is
released) violates the license?
How do you determine who has the right to take the violator to court? Is
there a precedent for this in the free software movement?
F
>
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