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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: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 11:10:02 +0000

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.




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