Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Erik Moeller <erik_moeller AT gmx.de>]

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