[cc-community] Ask for help: I agreed to a license by mistake

Tomislav Medak to-me at mi2.hr
Thu Feb 21 04:02:17 EST 2008


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Dear Cesare,

| And the question is: what can I do? So far I have removed my page there.
| I've read that you can't revoke a creative commons license, but can I
| still keep the more restrictive (by-nc-nd) license on my own website
| (and everywhere else) for these particular tracks? Or am I obliged to
| change it?
|
| I understand that somebody who got the tracks from Opsound.org when they
| were linked there could use them for commercial purpose, but what about
| other people? Somebody told me that if one of such persons makes a copy
| of one of my tracks to somebody else, the old license is applied. Is it
| true?

It depends on the jurisdiction whether granting use such as under a CC
license is revokable. Some copyright laws view revokability as an
inalienable author's right and some don't. In some jurisdictions
revoking might though burden for the revoking author to compensate the
loss of those who have received the work under the revoked licenses.
More importantly, however, revoking a perpetual, non-revokable free work
license would beat the purpose of having a license that allows
downstream use or re-use, and ultimately would have chilling effects on
the readiness of downstream users to use or, particularly, re-use free
works.

~From the perspective of a CC license you can always start distributing
your work under a different set of permissions (be that under a some
rights reserved license or under an all rights reserved regime). So, you
can re-licenses your work. However, for the copies of your work that
have entered downstream circulation before you have re-licensed your
work, remain under the license that they were originally distributed
under and this cannot be set back.

I would advise you to go back and speak to Opsound.org to remove your
work from their catalogs, if this has not been already done so by the
removal of your page, and to inform contributors in a more straight
forward fashion what license they are choosing and what that license
means for the contributor's work.

But, as Lucas has pointed out, likelihood of downstream use and re-use
of copies of your work under by-sa  such that it might harm your
commercial interest is not great.

Tom
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