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cc-licenses - Re: Copyright of derivative work released under a CC licence

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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: Copyright of derivative work released under a CC licence
  • Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:55:48 +0000

On Friday, December 03, 2004, at 01:46PM, Branko Collin <collin AT xs4all.nl>
wrote:

>I (who is NAL) don't think that is important. You tried to reproduce
>the original, not merely to be 'inspired' by it. Just because you did
>not wholly succeed, does not mean it is not a reproduction, and
>therefore a derivation. Your template is not an independent creation.
>Although we can argue whether it is technically a derivation, it
>certainly is morally one. The law intended this to be called
>derivation and an act of restricted copying.

IANAL either.

IMHO no. If you try to reproduce the original functionally then you are
reverse-engineering it. If you are trying to reproduce a theme or a look &
feel, unless it's trademarked or trade dress (or a registered design, hello
UK law), that's inspiration.

If you are copying an appearance exactly, that's breaking copyright. If you
are translating code or reproducing it from looking at the code, likewise.
But Apple couldn't sue Microsoft for "stealing" either the equivalent
functionality of MacOS (down to function names and effects) or the equivalent
behaviour and appearance of MacOS (which they tried to claim as trade dress).
And SCO aren't doing very well with their theory of code derivation.

The DMCA affects this if you're dealing with copy protection, and
click-licenses can affect your right to reverse engineer (see Apple and Real
at the moment).

Whatever the moral case, the legal test IMHO is whether you have in any
meaningful way copied the code, not the behaviour or appearance of the
interface (programmatic or visual).

The original poster has answered that a couple of times now IIRC. :-)

>"Copyright 2004 Raffaello Tesi, based on original work copyright 2004
>by Neil Turner."
>
>"Please send any questions or comments about this template to
>Raffaelo Tesi."

All this said, if both authors are happy with that statement it looks fine.
:-)

- Rob.





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