[cc-community] Being called a thief for using CC

Javier Candeira javier at candeira.com
Sun Feb 17 05:44:49 EST 2008


jonathon wrote:
> OTOH, his site violates the CC license, by adding clauses to it,
> without changing the name.

My non-lawyer's interpretation, after reading the license, is that they do
in the case of "aclaración" a, but not of b.

As I have said somewhere else, the second "aclaración" merely details what
attribution they consider reasonable, and I think it is so (again, that's
only my opinion, but I can qualify it).

> * Unless "Aclarcion" means something akin to "This is the my
> understanding of what the license permits".
> In the context, it looks like it means "This is the exception to which
> CC-BY-SA-NC 2.5 license does not apply".

The way I understand it, the first "aclaración" means "by non-commercial we
understand that putting on its webpages Adsense or any other ads, even for
other websites, or requiring registration, makes a project not non-commercial".

>From the wording I get the feeling that its authors understand that, since
the CC license doesn't really define "non-commercial", they can offer their
two cents on what they mean by "non-commercial" when licensing their
translation. Thus, they are in effect intending to change the license...

The problem is that "non-commercial" is only a tag to describe the license,
and the legal text does explain very clearly what the Spanish nc element means.


Translating like a layman, the relevant part text of the Spanish license
says that the rights from section 3 may not be exercised

"in a manner mainly intending or directed towards obtaining a mercantile
profit or private remuneration in money"

("de manera que pretenda principalmente o se encuentre dirigida hacia la
obtención de un beneficio mercantil o la remuneración monetaria privada").

That would be the Spanish wording for the non-commercial element in section 4-c.

So my conclusion is that yes, "aclaración a)" is not an "aclaración" but an
extra clause, and they are trying to break the terms of the CC license by
extending it.

As I say, IANAL, but I am copying David Maeztu and Javier de la Cueva, who
are the two most active lawyers on the cc-es mailing list, and also follow
cc-licenses.

Regards,

Javier Candeira


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