Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Peter Brink" <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

On Thursday, November 11, 2004 1:20 PM,
Philip Jägenstedt <philip AT lysator.liu.se> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> We, a student association by the name of Digifri, are looking for a
> way of allowing all and any use of the content of our website,
> www.digifri.org. I'm wondering if it is legally possible for us to
> place it in the public domain, or if that is only valid of the US?
> Personally, I would prefer using public domain over a one-liner in
> the style of "all is permitted, no rights reserved" since we can
then
> mark our data using creative commons metadata (plus I don't trust
> myself to be able to write a valid license, however short).
>
> We have thought about CC-Attribution, but would like to know what
our
> options are before making a decision. Many of us feel that we don't
> need to require even attribution since we don't care if someone uses
> our writing without giving credit. Before making a decision, we need
> to explore the options. Any help/suggestion is appreciated greatly.
>
> // Philip Jägenstedt
>
> NOTE: Please CC/BCC me me since I am not a subscriber to the
> cc-licenses list.

The CC licenses are written from an US point of view, they may or may
not work as intended in other jurisdictions. When it comes to the
public domain and attribution the difference btw the US law and (in
this case) Swedish law becomes quite obvious.

The concept of a public domain does not exist under Swedish copyright
law. The moral rights (e.g. the paternity and the respect right) an
originator has to his work(s) are indefinite; it's only the economic
rights that have a time limit. To put it in another way - a copyright
cannot ever fully lapse. The moral rights are (as can be seen in the
current court process vs. TV 4) often viewed as quite important by
many originators and the Copyright Act (3§) do state that the moral
rights to a work cannot be totally alienated, that is you cannot give
away all of your copyrights.

To my mind the CC-attribution license might be as close to your goal
as you can get, if you don't want to write your own license.

-- Peter Brink