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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 00:47:15 +0300

On Oct 7, 2006, at 16:09, Andres Guadamuz wrote:

Comparing FLOSS with CC is a problematic exercise for various reasons.
While a growing number of the general public is using open source and
free software, the licences are really applicable to a small minority
(comparatively) of developers, SMEs and larger enterprises. These people
tend to be knowledgeable, well-educated and have access to someone who
can speak English and/or understand the licences.

Moreover, if you don't accept the license, you don't get the rights, so a prospective licensee has an incentive to figure it out.

Now contrast this to
the target audience of Creative Commons. The movement exists to provide
an easy to understand manner to provide open content to a vast number of
people. Not everybody understands English, so translation makes a lot of
sense to a movement that has such a potentially large number of users.

The official party line has been that they are not mere translations but ports. Yet, even people close to CC tend to think of them as mere translations. Of course, in practice people will treat them as translations. If there's a language-independent photo licensed under, say, a Dutch CC license, most people around the world are going to read the Dutch license but a license in some other language.

She does not
speak English, so if we don't translate the licences, she would never
know about open content and free culture.

But they aren't mere translations but ports. How is the rest of the world going to know what weird stuff crept into the license when porting?

- Contract formation: In most countries licences are contracts, so the
draft has to accommodate local contract formation principles.

So does CC believe that people in country X can't use works licensed under a license from country Y, because the license from country Y doesn't follow the conventions of X?

Also, there's a much more tangible problem if it is true that people in country X *must* use licenses for country X: If I write in English, which I do a lot, using a Finnish-language license makes no sense. (Due to the way the world works, this is not symmetric and an English-language license for Finnish-language content is still practical.)

- Moral rights: software does not have moral rights in many
jurisdictions. On the other hand, all creative works have moral rights,
and the range of protection in this area alone is staggering.

Why can't the licenses contain a blanket waiver for what is waivable and that CC doesn't want specifically to retain? What is not waivable cannot be waived anyway.

- Drafting rules: In the UK we have a requirement by law to draft
consumer contracts in user-friendly language.

Can't the Generic version be in user-friendly language? Does the U.S. *require* unfriendly language to be used?

Moreover, why does CC consider the licenses consumer contracts? A mere consumer doesn't need the license to view the work. The license is needed for distribution and creating derivative works at which point the "consumer" is no longer in the role of a consumer. Again, if a consumer appealed to law to make the license invalid, the joke would be on him, because he wouldn't then get the right granted by the license.

- Quirky copyright implementation rules: different countries have
considerably different rules on the application of things like
technological protection measures (just to name one), or that have
considerably different definitions for some licence elements. Drafting
licences that recognise these local idiosyncrasies tend to be more
likely to stand up in court.

How does this work for use cases like Flickr? The content creation, consumption and remixing crosses borders. It isn't realistic that people only interact within their own country in the official language of their own country.

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






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