Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Peter Brink <peter.brink AT brinkdata.se>]

Rob Myers skrev:
> Javier Candeira wrote:
>
> > Mentioning moral rights and pseudo-waiving them where applicable serves
> > Creative Commons better.
>
> I believe that moral rights are un-waivable in some countries (Germany?) 
> so this approach would not work internationally.

Moral rights being un-waivable is probably the most common case. Btw 
Lessig has written an article about the isssue of CC and moral rights, 
see: http://lessig.org/blog/2005/02/on_the_challenge_of_moral_righ.html.

Lessig writes: "Moral rights -- which are not "European" but in fact 
common to the US/UK tradition and the European tradition (in our 
tradition, they are called "author's rights," and the great text on this 
is Lyman Ray Patterson's Copyright in Historical Perspective) -- don't 
admit of such easy manipulation. In many jurisdictions that protect 
moral rights, you can't just automatically give away the moral right, 
without knowing something about how, or in what context, the work is to 
be used. For those jurisdictions then, a Creative Commons-like mechanism 
just wouldn't work. Such a mechanism couldn't succeed, in other words, 
in effecting an agreement about such moral rights. Creative Commons is a 
hammer. This is glass blowing.

So our response to these jurisdictions is simple: we don't purport to 
affect the moral rights at all. They are left as they would be, because 
our tool can't effectively do anything about them. Thus, it is not 
because we don't "understand" moral rights that we don't do anything 
about them. It is instead because we precisely understand that our tool, 
given the law, can't do anything about them."


IMHO I don't see moral rights as a problem. In the author's right 
tradition copyright legislation has a strong social dimension. Authors 
are seen as a generally weak and powerless entity that need protection 
against vicarious publishers and other such buyers of copyrights and 
this is reflected in our laws. The freedom of contract is often partly 
restricted and there are also often rules that creates a strong 
presumption against complete transfers of rights and otherwise gives the 
author an advantage when disputes arises about how a copyright contract 
is to be understood. This social dimension is an important part of the 
system and it's not worth throwing away.

/Peter Brink