Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>]

On 27 Aug 2012, at 16:20, Rob Myers <rob AT robmyers.org> wrote:

On 08/27/2012 09:02 AM, Paul Keller wrote:

can we stop thinking in terms of liability/protection for a minute?
clearly protection and reduction of liability are not the main
consideration of most people using our licenses. they use the licenses

Legally speaking, people want to use the work without infringing
copyright. :-)

well apparently we can't stop speaking legally :)

because they want to *enable other to use a specific work*. If that is
my intention than it clearly helps that i am telling the potential user:
'you are free to use the work under these conditions' and and not some
watered down version of that statement.

But you cannot make that un-watered-down statement without exposing
yourself and downstream users to risk.

yes i can. by asking other known rights holders to if they are ok with me licensing the work under the license in question. this is exactly the kind of behaviour Creative Commons encourages on its Before licensing page (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing) which is prominently linked from the license chooser: 

Before applying a Creative Commons license to a work, you need to make sure you have the authority to do so. This means that you need to make sure that the person who owns the copyright in the work is happy to have the work made available under a Creative Commons license.

If you are the creator of the work, then you are most likley the owner of copyright and so can license the work how you wish. If you made the work as part of your employment, then your employer may own the rights to the work, in which case only your employer can decide to apply a Creative Commons license. If you made the work under an agreement, you need to check the terms of that agreement to see if the rights to the work were transferred to someone else.

If you are combining pre-existing works made by other people (unless those works are in the public domain, and thus permission is not required) or working in conjunction with other people to produce something, then you need to make sure that you have express and explicit permission to apply a Creative Commons license to the end result (unless your use of the pre-existing works constitutes fair use, and thus no permission is required). You do not own the copyright in a physical copy of a work, for example, a Madonna CD or novel by Calvino, and therefore you may not apply a Creative Commons license to those items. You can only secure express permission if you are in direct contact with the copyright owner, discuss Creative Commons licensing with them and they agree to a specific license. Of course, if you are combining a work that is already Creative Commons-licensed then you will also have the rights, provided your use is consistent with the terms of that license!

(emphasis mine). notice that this doesn't say anywhere: 'please do not worry about rights other people may have because our licenses do not apply to third party rights'. /paul