Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Friday, January 07, 2005, at 04:46AM, <evan AT wikitravel.org> wrote:

>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.

Well we did try. :-/

The next one like this is probably going to be moral rights. Moral rights 
have their place, the same as Copyright. But it's certainly not in SA 
projects, where they could be as effective as trademarks or patents for 
torpedoing downstream use of licensed material. And unlike patents and 
trademarks, they have zero entry and maintenance cost. You get them whenever 
you put pen to paper, just like copyright.

I believe that iCommons would like the moral right of integrity to become a 
CC module, largely because in Germany (and France and Belgium and possibly 
other civil law countries I think) you can't waive your moral rights. 
iCommons certainly seem to be ignoring Lessig on this for the UK licenses.

Having integrity as a CC module kinda makes sense, because the right of 
paternity is already a CC module: BY. But integrity may be more like 
collecting rights in that it would make more sense to align integrity with 
the intention of the license: so integrity should accompany ND and possibly 
vanilla BY but not SA (i.e. you probably want integrity for a "market" 
economy and maybe for "free circulation" but not for a "gift" economy).

The television companies I've talked to or heard about who are considering CC 
are very keen to keep integrity in order to keep downstream control of work. 
Which is understandable, but shows how it will be used if it's an independent 
module.

I believe that most international CC licenses are following the iCommons 
position and asserting integrity, so CC-IN would have to be the only 
negatively-phrased CC module: that is, including IN would remove the 
integrity requirement, unlike every other module where including it 
introduces a requirement. Otherwise CC-3.0 won't be compatible with 2.0 .

I'm also worried that we'll see a "black hole" effect on work with integrity 
if there's any sort of backdoor to allow non-IN work to be used with IN work 
where integrity cannot be waived. 

Don't get me wrong: as an artist it's nice to know I have legal grounds for 
complaint if my work is printed badly or credited to the wrong person. But as 
someone who works with SA material, I don't want people objecting to my use 
of their work (or not using my work because they're worried I will complain) 
because of integrity.

I'd urge people to read up on moral rights if they've not encountered them 
much before. 

- Rob.