[cc-community] Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"
Rob Myers
robmyers at mac.com
Tue Mar 29 09:50:41 EST 2005
On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, at 03:25PM, Greg London <email at greglondon.com> wrote:
>Oh for cripes sake. Software patents, heinous as they are, are manadatory law.
>The GNU-GPL licenses rights to its works as long as no one uses a
>software patent to create a proprietary version of the work.
>If someone secures a software patent, they do not have the right to
>use GNU-GPL code to do so.
Conditionalising downstream use on not asserting moral rights was one of the suggestions I made for handling moral rights in the CC-UK licenses.
Preventing someone from using patents to make a proprietary version of a work is different from preventing them from using moral rights to undermine a project, though. Moral rights are automatic, you don't have to pay for them as you do for patents. You can agree to avoid creating patents, you cannot agree to avoid creating moral rights (in most jurisdictions).
But a conditionalised license would *not* prevent you from asserting your rights, it would just remove your license to the work if you did. So your rights are unaffected. Whether this would be problematic in any given jurisdiction I couldn't say.
- Rob.
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