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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Retracting masterial distributed under aCC 2.0 BY-NC-SA Licence.

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: James Grimmelmann <james AT grimmelmann.net>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Retracting masterial distributed under aCC 2.0 BY-NC-SA Licence.
  • Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:31:29 -0500

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




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