[cc-community] FYI: comment by Eric S Raymond on CC

Robert Atwood lists at atwood.org.uk
Thu Feb 14 12:09:40 EST 2008


drew Roberts wrote:

> So, on the front page of my web site, I put a disclaimer that the contents of 
> this site are copyright by me and licensed under CC BY-NC, click here if you 
> agree to the terms of the license and want to access the site.
> 
> Everyone here now says that it is OK where you are for a for profit company to 
> access this site for their business use?
> 
> And if that is OK, if I have a link to a BY-NC pdf file on the site, could 
> they pull that down? What about a BY-NC audio file on the site?

My thought is, roughly put,  that they can 'pull it down' but cannot use 
the file in something they sell , or display publicly, (or in certain 
other ways that the relevant copyright legislation defines).

For example, cannot a commercial magazine writer listen to your CC_BY_NC 
audio, write a review of the audio and publish it for commercial 
reasons? Your audio is not in the publication, but the author had to 
listen to it. The idea of your audio existing somewhere is not 
protected, nor is someone else's verbal description of your audio 
protected, by any copyright I am aware of, the commercial distribution 
is of the review, not of your audio. Yet in some vague sense maybe they 
are 'accessing the site for their business use' , the 'use' of listening 
to it in order to write the review which they then sell for money.

Would you intend to prohibit this scenario? Or perhaps the phrase 
'Business use' is too poorly defined here,  hence the need for the 
proper legal text of the real license plus relevant legislation?



The technical hitch seems to be whether the act of pulling it down (thus 
caching on the company's server) constitutes some kind of 'public' 
display, as the previous posters mentioned  it seems that relatively 
recent copyright legislation specifically exempts this in those 
jurisdictions.




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