Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Saturday 07 October 2006 06:36 pm, Discussion on the Creative Commons 
license drafts wrote:
> Peter wrote:
> > AFAIK if the work is merely distributed, then this would mean that the
> > law of the licensor would be chosen, but if the works has been adapted
> > (or in any other way heavily transformed) then the law of the licensee
> > would be chosen.
>
> When I've run into this issue --- which has been people wanting to
> translate my material into the local language --- my generic solution
> has been to use Babelfish to machine translate my content into that
> language, then slap the CC licence for that language/country onto the text.
>
> The translator then goes to work, cleaning up the machine translation.
> Even though they refer to the English content, the work product is
> strictly under the localized CC Licence.  If there are any legal issues,
> the binding licence is the localized one, with the jurisdiction being
> that country. [The reason for the machine translation, is to minimize
> the number of English language documents with two or more licences.]

Adding this together with someone else saying that his advice would be to go 
to court near home if it came to that, do you think this is a wise course to 
persue? had you though of this?
>
> > Both of these strongly suggests, IMO, that it's the subjective opinion
> > of the licensor/copyrightholder that should govern the interpretation of
> > the contract (provided of course that the license text can accommodate
> > the licensor's interpretation).
>
> I suspect that the licence that will have the most problems here are the
> "NC" licences.  I am not convinced that any court will automatically
> accept what the person who put material under that licence thinks it
> means as being what it means. I wouldn't be surprised if a court ruled
> that the CC interpretation of "Non Commercial" was meaningless, and that
> the Licence meant something quite different.

See, this is why I asked about a meeting of minds in the case where the CC 
licenses are considered contracts. Courts actually do this? On a regular 
basis?
>
> >> No license and a fall back to standard copyright? Something else?
> >
> > Based on legal theory I would say that the license would be considered
> > void and there would be a return to copyright law, but that is a rather
>
> My impression was that there were a couple of jurisdictions in which the
> content reverted to "public domain", rather than "all rights reserved",
> if the CC licence was found to be invalid. [I don't remember which
> countries.  :(   ]

Could someone try and put together a list of such countries? Can we somehow 
not let our works be covered by CC licenses in such countries? (I am not sure 
I think this is smart, I am just asking questions to try and learn.)

It seems quite dangerous that I can lose my "valuable" copyrights to the 
public domain becuase a CC license is found to be invalid.

This is a simplistic thought, but could the license be worded something like:

All Rights Reserved unless the courts in your country hold the following 
license terms to be valid. ???
>
> > unproductive solution. It's more likely ,I think, that a court would try
> > and find a reasonable interpretation of the license. It would try and
>
> The "legal limbo" that gets very expensive, very fast.

I don't like very expensive, very fast.
>
> Note: I am not a lawyer.  This is not legal advice.
>
>
> xan
>
> jonathon

all the best,

drew
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