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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Non commercial question...

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Erik Moeller <erik_moeller AT gmx.de>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Non commercial question...
  • Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 22:04:14 +0200

Evan Prodromou:

I think you're wrong. The site owner publishes the works and is not the
copyright holder; absent any other agreement, the owner's only right to
publish it is through the CC license.

Let's take another scenario. I have a guestbook on my website. This guestbook contains advertising. Someone posts a comment to the guestbook. Do they own the copyright to the comment? Yes, of course. Do I have a legal right to reproduce the comment, including advertising? Yes, of course. There is an implicit act of licensing, which is inherent in the mode of publishing, regardless of any terms of use.

A license like CC-BY-NC is a contract that I can choose to accept or not. The problem is that a licensing grant on the site ("You agree to..") may affect the user's perception about how his submission is going to be used. As I said, if there's advertising on the site already, I think that's not much of an issue. If I write on someone else's blackboard that also has a commercial poster on it, I have no right to complain about that fact, even if the blackboard says, "only put CC-BY-NC texts on this blackboard."

But if the blackboard starts out clean, with these terms, and the owner *later* puts a big commercial poster on it after people have put their writings on it, I think the situation is a lot more ambiguous.

By clicking "Save", you agree to license this work under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license
2.5 or higher. In addition, you grant [Name of wiki site owner]
the right to publish the Work, verbatim or modified, on the
World Wide Web without restriction. If you don't agree to these
terms, don't hit "Save".

Yes, that is a good idea in any case.

Erik




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