Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>]

jonathon wrote:
> All:
>
> I received a very polite, informal, "cease and desist" letter.
>
> Basically, the sender wants all of my material that mentions a specific
> website to be removed from public distribution.  I've removed the
> relevant material from my website.
>
> One of the points they want, is assurance that the material will
> not be redistributed by third parties.
>
> My understanding is that they are perfectly willing to go to court over 
> this. The judge will issue a ruling in their favour. That judgement 
> will, in theory, trump the CC licence. I don't see any point going to 
> court, knowing that the best case scenario for me, is that I lose. A 
> good faith effort, merely reduces the amount of damages can be awarded 
> against me.
>
> All of the affected material was distributed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
> license.
>
> I've gone thru that licence, and can't find a way to prevent further
> distribution of the offending material. Have I missed something?

The following is not legal advice . . .

In general no, a CC license is not revocable.  You cannot revoke your 
grant of permission to your licensees to distribute the material you 
licensed to them.  The sender of the C&D can't reasonably ask you to 
stop the distribution because you probably have no power to stop it. 
This is not to say, however, that the sender might not have the 
ability/right to stop that distribution him- or her-self.

It would be useful to know on what basis the letter demands that this 
material be removed.  Is it a matter of copyright infringement, or 
something else?

James