[cc-community] confusing use of CC licenses?
Rob Myers
rob at robmyers.org
Tue Mar 10 05:22:39 EDT 2009
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Alek Tarkowski <alek at creativecommons.pl> wrote:
>
> We've just been contacted by a person inquiring, how he can reuse a work
> by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), made available in an University of
> Adelaide ebook collection under a CC BY NC SA license. (The work is a
> remix of Homer's Illiad).
>
> http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/
> http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/homer/h8i/
>
> This seems to me a really confusing use of CC licenses - the whole
> collection is CC licensed and contains solely works in the public domain.
>
> Is there any reason to do this?
(I am not a lawyer, I don't know the details of Australian law, so
this is just a guess.)
If they are claiming a copyright on the collection they can NC-SA that.
Or they could just be claiming copyright on the typographic arrangement.
In either of those cases it may be possible that the individual
textual components of the collection aren't under copyright but this
isn't an area I know very well.
If Australia's standard of originality is low (like the UK's) then any
modifications or improvements they've made on the text may qualify for
copyright.
Or they could be overreaching. ;-)
- Rob.
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