Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org>]

Prodromos Tsiavos wrote:
> Jonathon wrote:
> > Copyright, or even enforcement of copyright is not the issue.  The
> > major issue is whether or not Virgin should have had model releases or
> > not.
>
> I totally agree. However, the point I m trying to make relates to the 
> allegation of the claimant that he was misinformed regarding the meaning of 
> the term 'commercial'
>
> "to adequately educate and warn him . of the meaning of commercial use and 
> the ramifications and effects of entering into a license allowing such use."
> http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7680
>
> All I m saying is
>
> (a) that the more we are going to have non-professional creators, the more 
> we will have to deal with legal issues that normally would have been issues 
> involving only professionals.
> (b) the practice of introducing terms [e.g. commercial/ noncommercial] that 
> are not recognized or clearly defined by Copyright or other national laws is 
> prone to cause legal disputes
>
> > Model releases are irrelevant to copyright law.
> > A future CC license that contains a "model release" clause would, by
> > definition, be incompatible with prior licenses.  None the less,
> > material under existing licenses could be converted to a future
> > license, by a future user, despite that incompatibility.
>
> IMHO the "model release clause" should be in included in the next version of 
> the CC licences, though I m not sure how the incompatibility issue would be 
> resolved.

If a model release warning was included that just clarified that such 
issues exist, like with Moral Rights, this wouldn't be a compatibility 
issue. If the licence placed stronger constraints on the user than exist 
in law genrerally then this would be both a compatibility issue and a 
very bad idea.

So IMHO model release *requirements* should *not* be in the license.

Model releases are an educational problem not a license language 
problem. There are many more issues that the license doesn't cover: 
trademarks, patents, trade secrets, personality and publicity rights, 
hull designs, seed rights, etc., etc. . What should be in the license 
(and on the license deed, and in the FAQ) is a general warning that you 
need to make sure that you have all the rights you need and that the CC 
license is only a copyright license.

- Rob.