Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sarah Pearson <sarah AT creativecommons.org>]

Comments inline.

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 12:47 PM, Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org> wrote:

On 04/13/2012 12:24 AM, Christopher Covington wrote:
> For whatever it's worth, I think semiconductor mask rights are so
> similar to copyright that they should be given the same
> treatment--licensed rather than waived. Design patents should probably
> be treated similarly to traditional patents. I for one am in favor of an
> explicit patent grant. I don't have much more than a piecemeal
> understanding of all the issues and a gut feeling to motivate these
> positions, however.

One problem is that the CC 4.0 licenses will be used internationally. So
if you are in a country with mask rights but I am not, and I am in a
country with design rights but you are not, and we use each others work
then we may not be bound by the license in the way that the licensor
expects.

(I am not a lawyer, etc.)

Do people support licensing rights even where this is the case? For me
this is a key question.

Because copyright operates differently in different jurisdictions, in many ways this is already happening. That is, as a U.S. licensee I have different obligations under the license than someone using the same CC-licensed work in another jurisdiction. You're certainly correct to point out that this is an even more glaring inconsistency if we start licensing rights that do not even exist in all jurisdictions - for example, database rights. We have done our best in this draft to emphasize that the license only applies where "permission is otherwise required by law," which is designed to address this problem. Whether it conveys the concept in a sufficiently clear way for non-lawyers is an open question.

- Rob.

_______________________________________________
List info and archives at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
Unsubscribe at http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/options/cc-licenses

In consideration of people subscribed to this list to participate
in the CC licenses http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0 development
process, please direct unrelated discussions to the cc-community list
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-community