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  • From: Haggen So <haggen_so AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Rebecca MacKinnon <rebecca.mackinnon AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: ying chan <yingchan88 AT gmail.com>, cc-hk AT lists.ibiblio.org, Doreen Weisenhaus <doreen AT hku.hk>, Peter Yu <peter_yu AT msn.com>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-hk] Monday's CC meeting
  • Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 02:34:46 -0700 (PDT)

ATTENDEES: (Please correct me if I got your name wrong or let me know if I missed your name. I didn't have everybody's full name and not necessarily all titles.)

Dr. Catharina Maracke, International Coordinator, Creative Commons International
Prof. Ying Chan, Director, HKU Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
Li Yahong & Alice Lee, HKU Law Faculty
Hagen (sorry don't have full name - please let me know)

Not a problem, I did not make the spelling my name known to you on the night. My name is Haggen So ^_^

Deki - famous "Just a Sidekick" blogger :)
Janet Lau - City University
Micky Yip - City U, Legalvoice.hk
Nicky Tse - Trainee solicitor, Hau, Lau, Li & Yeung
Paul Cheung - City U., Legalvoice.hk
Chong Chan-yao HKU director of student dev
Ben & Oiwan Lam, Inmedia
Randy Shek - DotAsia lawyer, HKU, etc
Charles Mok - HK Internet Society etc.
Kenneth Yip- ASTRI.org - HK Applied Science & Technology Research Institute
Greg, Chinese U. information engineering student
Uta Lam - blogger, web 2.0 entrepreneur
Yat Siu, CEO of Outblaze
Rebecca MacKinnon, HKU

Just a follow-up question. I think it was Nicky who brought up the question about assistance from CC to defense the licenses. Catharina's response (correct me if I am wrong, as I also have an "illegal mind") was that the assistance was minimal as CC was only responsible for providing the licenses. Catharina also hinted that there might be legal difficulties if CC became proactive in reinforcing the licenses. The FAQ on CC also gives a similar answer http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Will_Creative_Commons_help_me_enforce_my_license.3F

I dug around the Internet about reinforcing GPL (in short, an Attribute-ShareAlike license for software, around since mid-80s) and had a number of interesting observations. I found that there were as least three approaches:

1. Free Software Foundation (FSF)
See FSF Free Software Licensing
http://www.fsf.org/licensing

FSF is the administrator of GPL and this foundation also proactively deals with license compliance problems. One reason for this is that FSF holds the copyrights for many popular free software programs, such as GCC and glibc. Therefore, they just have to enforce those licenses themselves.
So if an author transfers the copyright of his or her GPLed software to FSF, FSF will defense it. Of course, FSF does not just accept any GPLed code and I have to find out more on the criteria.

2. Other than FSF, there are a number of organisations friendly but independent from FSF dealing with the enforcement of GPL. Examples are:

GPL Violations.org Homepage
http://gpl-violations.org/

Software Freedom Law Center
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

3. There is also some information providing sites. One example is Groklaw(http://www.groklaw.net/). Though it has the "no legal advice" disclaimer, this online community contributed substantially to defensing Linux in the SCO vs IBM case.

When we consider that GPL Violations.org was established in late 2003, by June 2006, they already rectified 100 cases of GPL violations(http://gpl-violations.org/about.html#history). Also from the story told by Rebecca and Oiwan, CC license violations happen. I think it may be useful to discuss the approaches listed as a starting point and see what can be improved on helping CC users to defense the licenses.

Haggen


Rebecca MacKinnon
Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
University of Hong Kong (http://jmsc.hku.hk)

email: rmack AT hku.hk
blog: www.RConversation.com
Tel: +852-2219-4005

Co-founder:
www.GlobalVoicesOnline.org
"The world is talking. Are you listening?"





  • Re: [Cc-hk] Monday's CC meeting, Haggen So, 08/04/2007

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