Cc-hk mailing list

["Li Yahong" <yali AT hku.hk>]

Dear Catherina, Rebecca and Ryanne,

 

Dear all:

 

I am sorry for being silent in the past few days and did not respond to your email about the licence.  After hectically meeting the marking deadline last weekend, I have been involved in a conference this week, and have not been able to follow the email closely.  I apologize for overlooking any email that concern me and our legal team.

 

Many thanks, Catharina, for answering the first question raised by Rebecca.  Now let me try to answer the rest of the questions:

 

(1) About the version of the license the changes made from: we used the version 3.0 of the un-ported international licence, as instructed by Catharina. You can access this version within the page of cc international.  We worked on the working document provided by the CC international so that our licence can incorporate the most updated changes in the international version, and follow the correct format.  We did not adopt any model of other jurisdictions, e.g., US, UK, Australia and China, as we believed that none of them are perfect.  Instead, we analyzed the pros and cons in each of the licences of various jurisdictions based on the excellent research results provided by Rob and Jerry, and tried to incorporate the parts that suit HK's situation.  

   

(2) The major challenges we faced during the drafting process are that some terms and and their legal meanings in HKCO are different from those in the un-ported licence.  It is not a simple matter of replacing the terms, but it requires careful analysis of the legal meanings under those terms.  For example, after comparing with other jurisdictions' licences and analyzing sec. 29(1) of HKCO, we replaced "adaptation" with "derivative work" since we believe that the scope of "adaptation" in HKCO is much narrower than the scope of "adaptation" under the cc int'l un-ported licence, and "derivative work", as adapted by some other jurisdictions is more appropriate to be used in our licence.  

 

I would also like to take this opportunity to answer Ryanne's questions posted on Jan 10.  

 

About Clause 2 "fair dealing":  the phrase in the note "not added fair use" and "not added first sale" refer the licences of US, UK, and mainland China which "fair use" and "first sale" are included.  When we put the notes under the clause, we had Catharina in mind thinking that she may be aware of that fact.  Sorry for the confusion.

 

Clause 4f: after we sent the first draft to cc-international, we received Catharina's instruction that cc international is considering modifying the language about moral rights in the unported version to keep it as simple as possible, and we are recommended to adopt the language "moral rights remain unaffected to the extent they are recognized and not waivable by applicable law."  Catharina said that this has been done by many new jurisdictions.  we studied HKCO and made the modification to the language accordingly.  So yes, the unported licence has different wording, but ours is most updated.

 

Thanks very much for Ryanne's other very helpful comments and suggestions.  We will look into them for the purpose of future modification.

 

We welcome your inputs and will try our best to answer any questions raised.

 

Best regards,

 

Yahong

 

 

Dr. Yahong Li
Associate Professor
Faculty of Law
The University of Hong Kong

----- Original Message -----

From: Catharina Maracke

To: Rebecca MacKinnon

Cc: cc-hk

Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 11:00 PM

Subject: Re: [Cc-hk] license public discussion

Dear Rebecca and all,

thanks for pushing the discussion and trying to get feedback for the license draft. I guess Rebecca's questions can best be answered by the legal team in Hong Kong who has just gone through all the work to adapt the license to Hong Kong Copyright law. I just wanted to jump into the first question. We as CCi always ask for the first draft of a national license to be the Creative Commons Attribution / Non Commercial / Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) since every other element required for the remaining licenses can be found in the BY-NC-SA. It makes the work on the licenses and the discussion much easier to start in a first step with this specific license and then, once the legal team and CCi has agreed on a final version of that license, - in a next step - to work on all six licenses. 

I would appreciate a careful and critical review of this first draft since the detailed discussion at this stage of the porting process will help to avoid problems later on as Rebecca has mentioned. 

Many thanks to all of you!

Best wishes from Berlin,

Catharina

..............................................................................

Dr. Catharina Maracke

Director, Creative Commons International

Gipsstrasse 12

10119 Berlin

Phone: +49-30-28 09 39 09

Fax: +49-30-28 09 39 10

On Jan 10, 2008, at 12:55 PM, Rebecca MacKinnon wrote:

Hi everybody. So far nobody has asked any questions about the license. If we are going to launch in June, we need to make sure that we are able to obtain robust feedback from Hong Kong's IP and legal community by Chinese New Year. Otherwise we are in danger of running out of time to do revisions and further consultations if something really controversial comes up in order to have a license everybody is happy with in time for a June launch. So if we aren't likely to get much feedback before CNY we might need to consider delaying the launch. If we decide to delay the launch until the Fall or Winter we need to make that decision before the end of this month. A late July or August launch is best avoided due to the Olympics, which would guarantee the least possible amount of attention and highest possible airfares/hotel rates for people coming in. Then I assume Larry has to teach in the Fall and won't be so easily available again until Winter break.

So please, everybody, help us out with your own feedback and by soliciting feedback from others.
Note that the URL to download the draft license is here:
http://creativecommons.org/international/hk/

I have asked Henry Oh to work with all of you to make sure that in the next two weeks we reach out to everybody in the legal and IP policy community who needs to be aware of the impending launch of the license, and whose comments/feedback/criticism would help us avoid problems later on. So you can expect to hear from him both on and off list as he works to mobilize our efforts.

Meanwhile, as a non-lawyer and non-expert in IP I am going to kick off the discussion with some dumb questions for our legal team that probably seem obvious to IP lawyers and CC-insiders, but since I am neither and the answers aren't obvious to me, they might not be obvious to other people either.

1. We only have the draft of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 license. Is that because it addresses all the issues that are present in all the other licenses?

2. Notes in the draft refer to changes that were made. However it is not made clear which version of the license your changes were made from. What was the original license version that you were working from and where can we see a copy? Was it the UK license or the un-ported international license? If it was the UK license, I note that on the CC website only the 2.0 version is available... so is the 3.0 version available somewhere else online or can it be sent to us so that we can actually look at what the draft has been changed from?

3. More general question: what were the main challenges you faced in adapting the license from whatever the original was? Are there particular things you would especially like to get feedback on?

Thanks!!

Rebecca


--
Rebecca MacKinnon
Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
University of Hong Kong   (http://jmsc.hku.hk )
E-mail: rmack AT hku.hk | Tel: +852-2219-4005
Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com
Co-founder: http://GlobalVoicesOnline.org
"The world is talking. Are you listening?"

_______________________________________________

Cc-hk mailing list

Cc-hk AT lists.ibiblio.org

http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-hk

---

_______________________________________________
Cc-hk mailing list
Cc-hk AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-hk