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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] New Generic and ports

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen AT iki.fi>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] New Generic and ports
  • Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 00:19:25 +0300

On Oct 7, 2006, at 16:25, Peter Brink wrote:

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.

Don't France and Germany have Freedom of Agreement? If the prospective licensee claims that the license is not valid, the joke is on him, because he doesn't get to exercise any rights under the license.

3) Creators will feel safer when using a license written in their own
language.

What about licensees? How do I know what the terms for a photo licensed under e.g. a Dutch license are if the license is a port and not a mere translation?

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

That hasn't been a real problem with Free Software.

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.

FWIW, I think the equivalence of EU translations is even more of an illusion than the GPL working in Europe. I also think the EU would be better off if we had one set of binding directives in English, but that's off-topic for this list.

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.

It has worked in Germany. It might not work in *exactly* the same way as in the U.S., but don't you have Freedom of Agreement in Sweden (as in Finland--usually Finnish legal concepts are inherited from Sweden anyway)? With Freedom of Agreement, the form (including the language) of the agreement is not a problem if the parties agree to it, and you have to accept the form of the GPL in order to be licensed to exercise the rights granted by the GPL.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen AT iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/






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