Development of Creative Commons licenses

[evan AT wikitravel.org]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 02:45:59PM -0800, Johannes Ernst wrote:

> Reading through the CC licenses, it appears to me that they are very 
> silent on the issue of IP rights other than copyright in works covered 
> by CC licenses.

The 1.0 version of the CC licenses included a controversial
warranty/representation that the work was not, to the creator's
knowledge, encumbered by any other rights, such as privacy, publicity,
or patent rights.

Sadly, this section was removed in the 2.0 versions, to appease
bloggers, "samplers", and other people who are sloppy about clearing
rights on their work. Theoretically, a blogger who copied a New York
Times article verbatim into his blog would be responsible if someone
else republished it. Rather than give the obvious answer ("don't do
that"), Creative Commons decided to remove any representation that
the work was legal to republish.

This leaves the status of CC-licensed works up in the air; each
licensee is expected to do their own rights review before publishing
the work or derivative works. Yes, it's a terrible waste of effort
(hundreds or thousands of licensees having to do the same research
over and over again) but I think the justification was that licensees
should be thankful that they get any works at all, and should show
gratitude by doing the licensor's homework for them.

This was AFTER the SCO lawsuits over Linux, by the way. Most modern
Open Source licenses have a representation clause.

There was talk about adding an optional warranty/representation clause
("I have cleared the rights on this work") so licensors could give
some reassurance to licensees that their work was not an unpublishable
piece of crap. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist yet, and probably never
will.

Anyways, yeah: there's no mention of other IP regimes. It's a
regrettable weakness of the licenses that serves the careless and
disrespectful at the expense of everyone else.

~ESP

~ESP