Development of Creative Commons licenses

[creativecommons <jl AT creativecommons.pl>]

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay wrote:

> We are also constantly contacted by publishers or project leaders to valid
> or draft contracts complementary to CC licences.
> It is difficult to explain that we can neither give legal advice nor provide
> the full value chain tools

That's not surprising: saying "here is a tool, but we are not going to 
tell you how to use it" is simply BAD. In our world boundaries beetween 
author and publisher are blurred. I post your art on my website, you do 
the same. That however may lead to numerous legal problems, and i think 
we in CC have to deal with it if we want to succeed.

> We were also thinking about providing a template or FAQ for side-contracts,
> so that website owners who are not lawyers can draft themselves plain text
> copyright licenses to have the authorization to publish author's works under
> CC.

That's exactly what is needed. I even wrote down such a simple, one page 
license (in polish), but i'm not a lawyer, so i cannot evaluate it.

> providing a template may
> lead to even more questions...

I was publisher of cultural magazine for several years (not anymore, but 
i was). Now i think, that during all that years there were only few 
situations i couldn't use any non-NC (look down for explanation) CC 
license.
And there were only two kinds of agreements with authors: i ask someone 
to create something and i pay him (so we sign an agreement). Or someone 
want's his content to be published and i don't pay him (and we don't 
sign anything, what is unacceptable in this case).

That gives us finite number of different agreements which will not vary 
that much beetween (i arranged that in form of a web form for publishers 
:-):

      |   i pay u   | i don't pay you
------+-------------+-------------------
BY-SA |download me! | download me!
------+-------------+-------------------
BY-ND |download me! | download me!
------+-------------+-------------------
BY    |download me! | download me! ------+-------------+-------------------

In Polish law you probably cannot pay for creating content in terms of 
service, so you need different agreements. I'm not a lawyer, so maybe 
i'm wrong; that also must not be true in other jurisidctions. Maybe just 
a simple "i, an author, agree that my works will be published under 
this-and-this CC license" with some glitches will work in most cases.

> About your first thoughts: I do not understand why publishers should not use
> NC

Beacuse with NC you can't sell your printed magazine, even for nominal 
fee. Don't try to incorporate NC text or music into your play - if 
people attending are paying for tickets, it's illegal. And probably you 
can't even post a banner on your website to cover bandwith costs if you 
host NC content - can you? NC is a forbidding, not permitting license: 
it says you can't use NC content in any way unless you agree to cover 
_all_ cost of spreading it. And that excludes pretty much all publishers 
in this world.

> Maybe 3 or 4 use cases could be easily defined.

Most publishers simply want to make sure they have rights to publish 
something. Usually they don't care about others publishing the same: 
first on the market wins. Or others reusing content. If they care they 
will not use CC license anyway. And all what _ours_ publishers need is 
just a piece of paper to show in a court in case of some disagreement 
with author.

> Can we include this in Harvard agenda discussion?

Of course, but please explain what is this Harvard agenda?
greeetings
(and thank you for your insight)
Jaroslaw Lipszyc



> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : cc-licenses-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:cc-licenses-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]De la part de rekrutacja
> Envoyé : vendredi 10 juin 2005 15:41
> À : Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts
> Objet : CC licenses legal advice for publishers needed
>
>
> Hi all
> I'm part of Creatice Commons Poland, which started a month ago. Right
> now we got a strange situation: we didn't have media campaign (yet), so
> there is not so many artist interested in publishing under Creative
> Commons licenses, but we are lobbiyng a lot, so there are several
> publishers from cultural, political and other magazines intersted in
> adopting CC-licenses model.
> This leads to problems: in order to publish a work under CC license in
> their magazines publishers need authors approval. Written and signed,
> beacuase publishers don't want to get into future legal problems.
> So all of them asked CC about such an approval form.
> We got fierce discussion on polish cc list about it, but couldn't reach
> agreement what kind of contract/st atement/license is needed in such a
> case. Situation is unique, because usually author is a publisher itself,
> so he just attaches CC-license info. But there author is not a publisher
> of his work, and it's a publisher who want's to publish it under CC
> license.
> My idea is that we should try to create some kind of legal FAQ for
> publishers and standarized forms they can use. Benefits of such service
> are quite obvious, i think.
> First thoughts: we should make clear that publishers cannot use NC
> licenses, and also differantate cases where author just allows
> publishers to use his work under CC license from cases where publishers
> pays an author to write  somehing what will be published under CC license
> Please, share your opinions and ideas.
> Jaroslaw Lipszyc
>
>
>
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