Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Saturday 07 October 2006 09:25 am, Peter Brink wrote:
> Henri Sivonen skrev:
> > Considering that Free Software and Open Source has worked fine with
> > English-only licenses, that non-Americans are routinely using the
> > existing U.S./"Generic" CC licenses and that CC now has a "New
> > Generic" license draft that is designed to work globally, what's the
> > point of having ports of the 3.0 series instead of using the "New
> > Generic" with English as the governing language everywhere?
>
> There are several reasons why "localized" licenses is a must:
>
> 1) There may be formal requirements for copyright contracts (or indeed
> contracts as such) in certain jurisdictions (both France and Germany for
> example has such rules IRRC) that must be met or else the license fails
> to come into force.

So, what happens when a german wants to build on my BY-SA work which I 
released under the english language generic one?
>
> 2) Having a text in the local language, adapted for that jurisdiction
> will be immensely valuable if a court needs to analyze the license.

Makes sense, but if mine is the plain BY-SA-2.0 or 2.5 say, would a court in 
another country, say Gernany, try and apply the english one which I released 
my work under, or the Greman one, which I have never read?
>
> 3) Creators will feel safer when using a license written in their own
> language.

True.
>
> 4) It's necessary to be able to assure creators that the license is
> enforceable.

See my questions above.
>
> One could compare to how the European Union deals with the problem of
> harmonizing rules across many jurisdictions. Resolutions (which are
> directly binding legal instruments) and directives (which are binding
> legal instruments that must be implemented nationally) are written in
> French, translated to German and then to English. All the other 23
> translations are based on those three versions. The CC licenses is
> probably best compared to a directive. A directive sets up the legal
> rules (and the results of those rules) that a member state's legislator
> must implement. How that is done is however up tho each member state.
>
> The generic CC-license detail the legal effects (or results) that the
> license should have, it is the task of the national CC-groups to
> implement this using a legal language that creates the same effects (at
> as close as possible) as the generic license. As long as the generic
> license is based on U.S. law the differences btw the generic license and
> the will by necessity be fairly large. These differences will become
> smaller with the new 3.0 license, but (as I wrote above) there will
> still be many reasons why we will need to implement the generic license
>   nationally.

Thank you for this.
>
> A major difference btw CC and the EU is of course that CC lacks any
> ability to enforce its own interpretation of the license. Disputes about
> how the implementation(s) of a EU resolution or directive has been
> carried out or about how to understand the rules of a directive or
> regulation are arbitrated by the the Court of Justice and the Court of
> First Instance of the European Communities. It's btw a serious mistake
> to think that CC's opinion on how the license works would have any
> impact on how court would interpret the license. It's the parties
> opinions that matters.

I do see this as a danger in the whole CC world. Since I have seen it said 
here on the list that in many places these licenses are contracts, do those 
places have the "meeting of the minds" concepts?
>
> In fact the entire Open Source is based on the illusion that the GPL
> would work the same way in the U.S. and (for example Sweden) - it won't.

But if it doens't, what do you get? No license and a fall back to standard 
copyright? Something else?

> One *must* have "localized" license that implements a common set of
> effects to be able to, with any kind of certainty, assure creators that
> WYSIWYG, i.e. that they can trust the license.
>
> /Peter Brink

all the best,

drew
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