Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Kevin Phillips (home)" <tacet AT qmpublishing.com>]

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Jordan Hatcher's lists

To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:38 AM

Subject: [cc-licenses] License Jurisdiction Questions

On 28 May 2007, at 17:00, cc-licenses-request AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

[snip]

I'll second what James said, about the UK law being different.  In addition, the UK is not one single jurisdiction, but much like a federal system (such as the US) is made up of primarily three different jurisdictions -- Scotland, England & Wales, and Northern Ireland.  Whilst most of the IP law in the UK, including copyright, is at the UK level (i.e. applicable in all three) there are several differences in other law between the jurisdiction.  Scotland has different rules for contracts and this necessitated a different CC licence for Scotland.  These difference meant that the CC licence was  a contract, and since it is used by consumers, had to be in plain language to comply with the law. So in actuality, there are two different licences for the UK -- CC Scotland and CC E&W.  NI doesn't have a CC international group as of yet AFAIK.

 

ok - interesting.

As far as the licences being different, in a perfect world everyone in all of the individual jurisdictions would be able to update the licences all at once.  But as we are all volunteers, it just doesn't work that way. The Generic CC licence serves as a master template for everyone else to update their licences, and some are faster than others.  

 

Yeah, I didn't intend for that to sound as "critical" as it came off in the email, I was wondering if it would be wiser to sync the release by waiting for those who are slower, rather than aggrivating the problem.  I'm sure this was considered and dropped at some point, probably by those impatient Americans ;) *ducks*

 

As far as "a chorus of voices singing from slightly different song books", we have that already as there is a wide variety of content licensed under the older CC licences already, and of course all of the individual jurisdictions, even if all 3.0, have different legal systems and so may include other rights or be enforced differently.  For example, some Continental licences include database rights (the Dutch for example).

 

Yeah, again it's very confusing to Mr Average.  I wonder how many folks don't even realise there's a jurisdiction granularity to the license?  This is where my original concern and question sprung from.  I noticed I was agreeing to licenses offered to me by US-based websites.  Then it occured to me such a thing might not even be valid as I'm not even sure they mention jurisdictions let alone allow sub-selection...... 

I noticed recently the official licenses for us folks in the UK aren't the

same wording as those in the US.  There's an effective "translation"

obviously because of differences in language.  Interestingly I know of no cc project for music which offers licenses from different jurisdictions directly.

For instance, I create a song and post it to ccMixter for remix, I also post it's component parts to Kompoz.com for others to contribute.  ccMixter doesn't support SA licenses, so I select the defacto NC license, Kompoz allows BY-SA so I submit the component parts there for others to work on (ie. bass, piano, vocal, drums).  Presumably I'm ok to do this as far as the licenses go, so far ok?  Well, my submissions to Mixter/Kompoz  I've done with the license options provided which I'm assuming are available in my

jurisdiction, yes?

AFAIK, there has been no effort to export any of the CC licences other than the main 6 to other jurisdictions. As my friend Andres says, we should have a Statute of Anne copyright licence instead of the "Founders Copyright".

 

Ok, so I can write music, sing a bit, program computers, I can goto a website and select a license AND I have a rough idea what the license means but you lost me somewhere around the word "Statute..." lol :D

 

Thanks for the response Jordan.

 

Kev

 

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