[cc-community] Ask for help: I agreed to a license by mistake
jonathon
jonathon.blake at gmail.com
Fri Feb 22 12:00:25 EST 2008
drew wrote:
> Still, I ask if the only safe thing to do with Free licensed works are to directly contact the claimed copyright holder to verify the license before making use of the work?
a) I think that the lawsuits about CC license usages have indicated
that that is an absolute requirement.
b) All of the media law material I've read has said (paraphrased):
* Find out who the copyright owner is;
* Verify that you have permission to use the work;
* Keep written records of all attempts to do the above steps;
> And what do we do where a false claim is made?
If the real copyright holder can't be contacted, then there isn't much
one can do, other than add it to one's personal list of known orphaned
works for which the only legally safe assumption is that they are ARR.
(Web hosts, are for reasons best known to themselves, unwilling to
even acknowledge that they host copyright material, until they receive
a DMCA take down notice.)
> And what do we do to prevent people falsely claiming to release their works under a Free license for the benefits that arise and then when contacted, claiming otherwise.
The first time or two, I'd suggest to the copyright owner that they
remove the work from the site.
With a string of repeated denials, I'd file a complaint with the
webhost in question, about the license misrepresentation.
With a string of repeated offenses by the same individual, I'd file a
complaint about license misrepresentation with the attorney general of
the state that they are in, with a CC to the registered agent of the
webhost.
> having to contact all copyright holders directly in order to feel that one is being safe in one's operations?
The type of license that a work has, has nothing to do with the
requirement that one do due diligence on the work, prior to reuse.
> Do they have a proper BY-SA license to the work in question?
Is the license in the metadata?
Is the copyright in the metadata?
Is there a reasonable expectation that the license is what it purports to be?
Is there a clear link between the copyright holder and the site that
the work is on?
One of the photographic societies suggests that even if the answer to
the above questions is "yes", you still can't assume that the license
is what it purports to be, because of the amount of online digital
image fraud.
###
On a semi-related note, a prominent Internet site back in the late 80s
and early 90s was hosting material which was licensed to them under a
fairly liberal license. The only problem is that the data in that
material, was not the data for which they had the license. The
repercussions of that "accident" are still being felt in that field.
(Pretty much all similar data in that field has both the hard-copy and
e-text lineage of the data, as well as the license under which it may
be used.)
xan
jonathon
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