Development of Creative Commons licenses

[MJ Ray <mjr AT dsl.pipex.com>]

Please cc me. I am not subscribed to cc-licenses.

Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> Anyway, I did notice Nathanel's post 
> <https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2004-March/000628.html> 
> and 
> brought it up internally:
> > On Apr 5, 2004, at 1:11 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> > > we should take the opportunity to fix since we're dragging on 2.0?
> > doesn't matter. if in fact the statement prohibits things the law 
> > doesn't
> > let it prohibit, the law wins. "the law" includes fair use.
> So in this case we decided to do nothing. [...]

Please tell me that the other author there is not a lawyer either!

I think they missed what law is "the law" for this. It's easy to do. I 
am writing about a problem with the copyright licence, so it's 
copyright law. That doesn't interact much with trademark law. In the 
UK, the two are even grounded in different acts.

If that trademark section gets included as a term in someone's 
copyright licence, I believe I have to comply with it to get the 
permissions granted, regardless of whether it would be fair use of a 
trademark to breach it. Copyright law does not prevent you from having 
a condition that denies fair use of a trademark. In fact, I suspect 
you could offer a copyright licence that says "The recipient may copy 
and distribute this work, if and only if they give the copyright 
holder legal custody of their first-born male offspring" and they 
either sign away their son or don't have permission.

Thanks for raising this, but please can you press it again?

Please, fix the CC licence pages to clearly show that the trademark 
notice is not part of the copyright licences, and announce that fact 
widely because some users have included the trademark notice as a 
clause in copyright licences.

This particular change does not require bumping the CC version number 
IMO, just fixing the presentation so people don't need to read html 
source before they realise the break.

--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
Help hack the EuroParl! http://mjr.towers.org.uk/proj/eurovote/