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cc-licenses - Re: CC & other forms of IP -- puzzled

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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 & other forms of IP -- puzzled
  • Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 00:11:47 +0000

On 4 Jan 2005, at 22:32, Greg London wrote:

I don't understand why Intellectual works should not be handled
together in a single license if the purpose of that license is
to provide a "spectrum of rights" as is CC's declared mission.

IMHO the examples I gave allow a finer grained control of those rights/monopolies, with rights-holders being able to control how trademarked materials are used (and interact with copyrighted material) than combining them with copyright.

Any intellectual work that can be copied and distributed electronically
can be impacted by copyright, patent, trademarks, database,
and even freaky-dink stuff like DMCA by anti-circumvention clauses.

The CC copyright licenses cover anti-circumvention, performance rights and even moral rights. But these all relate to copyright rather than being distinct rights or restrictions.

Should CC turn a blind eye to other ways of restricting community
works because these approaches do not fit in the realm of copyright?

ShareAlike, at the very least, should make an attempt to secure
the works to the community, and should not limit itself to copyright
if other means are available to restrict a work and turn it into a
proprietary lever.

The various Market Economy works can ignore the other rights
(patents, etc), since their purpose is to give up only enough
rights to genrate free advertising/free distribution for the
original author, so giving up patent rights doesn't make sense.

I don't think the NonCommercial license needs to say
"this license makes no claims on patent, trademark, etc rights"
because unless a right is specifically licensed, it is kept by
the original owner. Though it might not hurt to put that in
the page about licenses.

ShareAlike, however, could benefit from community protection
being extended to include patents, trademarks, etc.

My point was that trademarks (etc.) could conceivably be licensed in themselves, and so would deserve their own license. This could be interesting for creative use of licensing, and would not encumber the copyright licenses.

Trademarks (etc.) can also be used in/by copyrighted works, so how trademarks (etc.) interact with CC-licensed work is also important *if* it is going to have an impact on the intention of the license. The examples you give of keeping the "other IP" licensing congruent with the copyright licensing is one solution, and is the one that I'm coming to favour for handling moral rights. But each kind of "IP" is different and has different requirements and effects, and I am not sure how effectively they could be used to torpedo copyright-based creative/cultural (rather than technical) projects. If anyone has any examples I am interested in understanding this.

One example of a separate trademark and copyright license serving the community quite well is the way that games publishers are still using the OGL (copyright license) but are using d20 (trademark license for OGL work) less since WoTC revised the d20 license terms. This wouldn't have been possible if the two were combined.

- Rob.



--
http://www.robmyers.org/ - A decade of art under a Creative Commons license.
http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/ - Art, aesthetics & free culture weblog.





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