Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mia Garlick <mia AT creativecommons.org>]

Hey David, 

In response to Question One - the sourceforge discussion may be hinting at the fact that it is arguable that the public domain dedication is not as comprehensive in those countries which have moral rights and where those moral rights are not waivable.  In this situation, while the copyright rights were dedicated to the public domain, the creator would arguably retain moral rights with respect to the work because the law does not allow them to be waived.

In response to Question Two -  the  GPL disclaimers are specific to software, for which the GPL was designed.  They disclaim warranties for merchantability/fitness for purpose and for damage resulting from use/failure of the software.  These disclaimers relate to goods that have a functional use that might cause physical or other harm, rather than to disclaimers relating to the owners rights as a copyright holder.  Our licenses are not designed for use with code.  We recommend using the Gnu Free Documentation License for code or the GNU GPL-CC commons deed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/.  

Mia Garlick
General Counsel
543 Howard St., 5th Floor
San Francisco CA 94105-3013
United States
Tel: 415-946-3073
Fax: 415-946-3001
http://creativecommons.org/

Please note: the contents of this email are not intended to be legal
advice nor should they be relied upon as or represented to be legal
advice.  Creative Commons cannot and does not give legal advice. You
need to assess the suitability of Creative Commons' tools for your
particular situation, which may include obtaining appropriate legal
advice from a licensed attorney.
On Apr 12, 2005, at 11:54 AM, David Isaac wrote:

> Questions arose on the docutils-develop list
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7032080&forum_id=8812 
> as to the applicability of the public domain license
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
> outside of the US.  Specifically it was suggested that 
> certain rights cannot be given away this way in France and 
> Germany, and that these rights may or may not be relevant to 
> the intent of the license.  Question #1: is the CC Public 
> Domain license able to accomplish its intent outside the US 
> and specifically in France and Germany?
>
> A secondary matter arose: the public domain license contains 
> no disclaimer, in contrast e.g. to the GPL.  So question#2:
> shouldn't the CC Public Domain license include a disclaimer,
> or is there something about the public domain that makes 
> this irrelevant even for identifiable authors?
>
> Thank you,
> Alan Isaac
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses