Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, at 03:25PM, Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> 
wrote:

>Oh for cripes sake. Software patents, heinous as they are, are manadatory 
>law.
>The GNU-GPL licenses rights to its works as long as no one uses a
>software patent to create a proprietary version of the work.
>If someone secures a software patent, they do not have the right to
>use GNU-GPL code to do so.

Conditionalising downstream use on not asserting moral rights was one of the 
suggestions I made for handling moral rights in the CC-UK licenses. 

Preventing someone from using patents to make a proprietary version of a work 
is different from preventing them from using moral rights to undermine a 
project, though. Moral rights are automatic, you don't have to pay for them 
as you do for patents. You can agree to avoid creating patents, you cannot 
agree to avoid creating moral rights (in most jurisdictions).

But a conditionalised license would *not* prevent you from asserting your 
rights, it would just remove your license to the work if you did. So your 
rights are unaffected. Whether this would be problematic in any given 
jurisdiction I couldn't say.

- Rob.