Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

Matt Burrows skrev:
[ Caps removed by me...]
[ snip ]
> Note - I dont consider the above potential abuse to be a significant issue
> here.  There are other ways for abuse already inherent in the license format
> itself - eg,  it does not require a signature, a party could claim they did
> not have an attorney review the license and, therefore, did not fully
> consent to its terms, the license was "take it or leave it" and not freely
> negotiated, etc.  These are all potential outs which we live with for the
> sake of practicality and efficiency.

The form of the contract is not that much of a problem. An licensee who 
argued along those lines would get himself sued (or worse) for copyright 
infringement... It's reasonable to assume that the general public is 
aware of that a copyrighted work cannot be copied, distributed or 
transformed without proper permission. GPL and CC's licenses are 
beneficial contracts, the copyright holder freely yields some of his 
rights, provided that the user abides by certain rules. The constraints 
placed on the user cannot be said to be non-equitable and the user can 
hardly claim that he is unaware of that copyrighted works cannot be 
freely used without proper permission. A party who makes use of a 
copyrighted work, as permitted by a Open Source or Open Content license, 
and then violates the terms of the license would therefore hardly be 
able to defend itself by claiming that the terms of the contract are 
non-equitable, nor could he claim to be free to choose what terms to 
agree too just because it's a adhesion contract. If a licensee makes use 
of a licensed work in violation of the terms of the license, he is in 
breach of the contract and, as a result, also infringing upon the 
copyright of the licensed work. There's no easy way out.


/Peter Brink