Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Gisle Hannemyr <gisle AT ifi.uio.no>]

On 30.04.2012 19:28, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:03:53 +0200 Gisle Hannemyr wrote:
> 
> [...]
>> However, I think it is important that users of CC BY-SA has
>> protection against their opinions being distorted.  The correct
>> solution, in my opinion, is not to include a mandatory disclaimer,
>> but to have the following clause in the license:
>>
>>    You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory
>>    action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to
>>    the Original Author's honour or reputation.
>>
>> [This clause is in CC BY-SA 3.0 (unported), but not in v4.0d1.
>>  It needs to be reinstated.]

> No, please!
> 
> It's one of the few issues that I see in CC-v3.0 licenses and that has
> been solved in CC-v4.0draft1...
> 
> Please see:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-licenses/2012-January/006605.html

Where you wrote (on 2012-01-15):

  "I cannot understand the effect of this section: it seems to enforce
   moral rights through economic rights (because it restates moral
   rights in a copyright license), which sounds awkward anyway.

  "But it seems to carefully avoid extending or strengthening moral
   rights in jurisdictions where they are weak or almost absent,
   since it says 'Except [...] as may be otherwise permitted by
   applicable law [...] You must not distort [...]'.

  "Consequently: if it's a no-op, why has it been included in the
   license?  If it has some effect, I cannot see which (apart from
   a possible chilling effect on people willing to create adaptations
   in order to criticize the original work or author, which is not
   good at all...)."

First: Moral rights does not have a chilling effect.  People are free
to make adaptations in order to criticize the original work or author
- as long as they avoid being prejudicial to the Original Author's
honour or reputation.

Second: To regard copyright law as only concerned with economic
rights is (at least to me) a strange way of looking at copyright.
Copyright is about both *economic* and *moral* rights, and both
has to be covered by an international public license, for the
simple reason that this is how the majority of jurisdictions
look at copyright.  (Some tells me that the USA is different,
but to me, it looks as if moral rights is alive and well,
even in the USA, re:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jackson-browne-settles-with-gop-over-running-on-empty-ad-use-20090721
)

The Creative Commons cannot avoid being explicit about how moral
rights are handled in its public license.  The language used in
version 3.0 is an obvious compromise between those that will like
to dismiss moral rights as "a French idea" that has no real
usefulness, and those that want strong moral rights to
preserve the honour and reputation of artists and literary
and artistic works.

At the present time, I have no better suggestion than keeping
the compromise about moral rights that were used in
CCPL ver. 3.0 in ver. 4.0 of the CC public license.
-- 
- gisle hannemyr [ gisle{at}hannemyr.no - http://folk.uio.no/gisle/ ]
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