[cc-community] Declaration of CC and copyright on the same website

Gavin Baker gavin at gavinbaker.com
Fri Mar 21 12:38:14 EDT 2008


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Timothy Vollmer wrote:
|
|
| On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 10:04 AM, drew Roberts <zotz at 100jamz.com
| <mailto:zotz at 100jamz.com>> wrote:
|
|     On Friday 21 March 2008 09:43:55 Gruber Lukáš wrote:
|      > Hello to all,
|      >
|      > I have been subscribed to this list for quite long time and it
|     finally
|      > comes the time to ask you for advise. Just short personal
|     introduction
|      > before : I´m working in Web Archiving project of the National
|     Library of
|      > the Czech Republic and as a part of my duties I sometimes deal
|     with issues
|      > concerning to cc licences on the "czech" websites. Czech
|     copyright law
|      > accepts open-source licences (including CC) as a tool for
|     licencing work
|      > since summer 2006. We didnt oficially translate CC licence so
|     far, so we
|      > use version unported 3.0...
|      >
|      > And here´s the problem :-) What does it mean if the same website
|     contains
|      > CC (BY-NC-ND) licence and also symbol for copyright ((c)
|     2003-2008 plus
|      > name of the author)?. What does it say to user? Is he allowed
to use
|      > content of website according to CC licence (some right reserved)
|     or is he
|      > constrained to keep the "full copyright" (all rights reserved)?
|      >
|      > I will try to express myself more concretely... If I followed
|     this BY-NC-ND
|      > licence, I would be free of making  copies of the work and use it
|     with
|      > proper attribution in  non-comercial way... But If I followed the
|     copyright
|      > declaration, I would have to ask author for permission to do
|     so... Is that
|      > right?
|
|     I don't think so. The gpl howto might make this a bit clearer.
|
|     http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
|
|     "Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two
|     elements
|     to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as
|     "Copyright
|     1999 Terry Jones"), and a statement of copying permission, saying
|     that the
|     program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public
|     License (or
|     the Lesser GPL)."
|
|     So, you have a statement of your copyright, and then a license grant
|     for the
|     copyrighted work.
|
|     Unless I am wrong of course. But that's how I would initially
|     approach things.
|     Let's see what others have to say on the issue.
|
|
| Lukas--we can see how the marks for both "((c) 2003-2008 plus name of
| the author)" and "CC BY-NC-ND" might be confusing, but they are not
| mutually exclusive. Authors retain the copyright in the work, so that
| mark is appropriate. Creative Commons offers a /license/ that tells
| others how they may use the work, so that mark is appropriate when
applied.
|
| So, agreeing with drew--we have a (1) copyright notice and (2) license
| notice
|
| ianal, but this is how it looks to me.

This is how I use CC licenses: first, a copyright notice; then, a license.

A copyright notice does not conflict with a CC license. I have seen some
pages which mistakenly claim "All rights reserved" at the same time they
use a CC license; I have contacted some authors about this, who
generally are simply mistaken and intend to use the CC license.

(Aside: I also saw the opposite recently: A page using BY-NC-ND, with a
notice "Copying not permitted". Presumably this author was also confused.)

Why use a copyright notice in addition to the CC license?
- - It clearly identifies the rightsholder of the work. This is useful for
helping users properly attribute (per the CC license terms). It also
makes it easier to identify the rightsholder in case a user wants to use
the work under terms beyond those of the CC license. (CC may not be
around in 70 years, when your copyright still exists...)
- - It clearly identifies the work's copyright year. This helps a user
determine if it is in the public domain due to expired copyright. (And,
as much as I like CC, it's not a replacement for the public domain.)

I think it would be beneficial for CC to encourage users to include a
copyright notice, for these reasons, alongside their license notice.

- --
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.
~    Thomas Paine
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