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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-community] Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-community] Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"
  • Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:50:41 +0100

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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