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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Am I a contract or not - that is the question...?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Am I a contract or not - that is the question...?
  • Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:18:43 +0200

Andres Guadamuz skrev:


(1) With invitation to treat (or invitation to offer in Sweden):
- Invitation to treat: the creator publishes the work under a CC licence.
- Offer: the licensee uses the work under the existing terms.
- Acceptance: the creator allows the use.

(2) Without invitation to treat:
- Offer: the creator publishes the work under a CC licence.
- Acceptance: The licensor uses the work under the terms and conditions.

I think that (1) is problematic.


Nr. 1 is indeed problematic in the case of an onerous contract. An offer must be visible to the acceptor. It's not theoretically possible to have an invitation to offer followed by an "silent" or implied offer after which comes an equally silent or implied acceptance. The offer must be explicit. If the licensee is supposed to offer the licensor to form a contract based on the license text that offer must be visibly targeted at the licensor and that would almost never be the case with any open source/content license.

Nr. 1 is however not problematic in the case of a beneficial act. The benefactor can bind himself to his own promise without any acceptance from the licensee. The offer-acceptance mechanism is avoided if we treat the license as a loan of copyrights.

Nr. 2 does not work in Sweden (or the rest of Scandinavia and AFAIK in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well). There is no offer in the license just an invitation to make an offer.

It's quite possible IMO to take the position that the license does not impose any obligations (in a contractual sense) on the licensee. The CC-license can therefore be seen as neither an license nor an contract but a loan. It's not a license because such an legal instrument does not exist in civil law jurisdictions. It's not strictly a contract because it's a beneficial legal act and not an onerous one. It's a loan because it does not transfer any ownership of property.

I think this is a neat and clever solution! However, I disagree that there are no obligations under CC licence, on the contrary. Even the most permissive licences (BY) contain several obligations. However, these obligations are mostly for licensees who will modify the work and make those modifications available to the public. All other licences deal with even more obligations (share-alike, non-commercial use, TPMs).

Well, provided that we are dealing with a beneficial "contract" those terms would probably not be treated as contractual obligations in Sweden but as instructions or regulations, i.e. as rules of behaviour. It's quite possible to bind a beneficiary to a set of instructions about how he/she should treat a given or loaned piece of property. If I gave away a horse I could instruct the receiver of the horse on how he should treat the it. If I would have sold the horse those instructions would have been labeled as obligations but that is not the case when I give the horse away. A unilateral legal act cannot force obligations on another party. A obligation is at it's most fundamental level a transfer of something which has a value from one party to another. Rules which describes how the licensee must behave need not transfer any value from the licensee to the licensor, in fact I don't see that any of the terms of the license creates an onerous burden on the licensee.

I think that using your above analysis, we could conclude that mere use of the work is not a contract but a loan, but that modification and/or publication of the work under any of the licences will be a contract because the licensee is under several obligations: non-commercial use, TPMs, no-derivatives, copyright notices, copyleft clauses, etc.

See above...

Would you be interested in writing an article on this? :)


Hmm, well I *have* been thinking of it. If I do write something I'll probably write something in Swedish first and then try and have it published in one of the Swedish legal periodicals before trying to write something up in English.


/Peter Brink




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