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cc-licenses - Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: CC licenses and "moral rights"
  • Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:47:33 +0100

Greg London skrev:
There are a number of Public Domain style licenses which are also
open source and are simple grants of copyright by the author to
anyone. The BSD style licenses simply release rights without any
contractual agreements.

When two people agree upon something that agreement is a legally speaking a contract. No open source license is anything else but a contract.

Second of all, even the most restrictive open source license,
GNU-GPL, can be viewed as a grant of rather specific and detailed
set of rights by the author to whoever wants them. The rights
granted are a subset of copyright rights. to quote the GNU-GPL:
>
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License"

An author granting the right for anyone to distribute the original
work as long as the author's name is highlighted in red is still
a function of copyright alone. a subset of the right to distribute
is granted by the author.

None of the rights granted by the GPL are conditional, which would
require an agreement from the downstream person. all the rights
are granted with a detailed list of where the right ends and
kept by the author.

A contract is a deed where someone is offering a grant to someone else. The grant need not be onerous, it can be beneficial, that is the offer need not have an condition. All open source licenses contain an offer, which is granted provided that the user agrees to the terms of the contract. Thus all open source licenses have at least one condition - that the user agrees to follow the terms of the contract.

That the offer is a waiver of a copyright really doesn't change a thing.


third of all, your assertion that code is purely functional
and is/should not covered by copyright tells me that you
don't write software for a living, or if you do, it must be
an excruciatingly boring job for you. My experience as an
engineer is that programming languages have huge room for
creative, artistic expression from the author. The courts
seem to recognize this as well.

Just for the record that wasn't my assertion. However (for the record) - the fact that there is room for creativity when writing source code doesn't mean that such possibilities are used. Functions, procedures and methods run a real risk of not being copyrightable, simply because they do tend to contain expressions which are purely functional.

/Peter Brink







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