Development of Creative Commons licenses

[John Hendrik Weitzmann <jhweitzmann AT mx.uni-saarland.de>]

Hi Diane,

> I suppose in theory it's conceivable that a licensee was never in
> compliance before they were in violation, but I have a hard time imaging
> that situation.

To my impression, insufficient attribution from the start is quite
common unfortunately, with commercial use of NC content being runner up.

But maybe we're misunderstanding each other here: The license if seen as
a contract comes into existence once a use is made while being aware of
the contractual offer and of the fact that the content is protected
under law. What can be present or not, reinstate or go away, is the
usage rights granted by the license.

So, yes, seeing it that way (but I thought that was only strange
Europeans who think contracts :-) it is hard to imagine a situation
where a user isn't in any agreement with the rights holder. But even
then, how can the rights REinstate if they were at no point granted
because of non-compliance from the start?

> Even if true, I don't think that's a reason to toss out
> the 30 day reinstatement provision -- retaining it doesn't break
> anything that I can see.  Do you think otherwise?

I agree, it doesn't break anything. My remark was just about
simplicity/short license text and about no change where none is needed.
In general I'm all for healing provisions.

>  As for benefits,
> there has been a lot of discussion on this list about the benefits,
> particularly for institutional adopters who feel it important to have
> some mechanism that ensures they get their rights back after they've
> fixed a violation.

Sure, but again: Isn't the usual case - even with those institutional
adopters - rather that of an accidental violation from the start? I find
it harder to imagine a case where there was license-compliant use first,
then only later something changed which constitutes a violation.

What we want to achieve, as I understand it, is this:

An institutional adopter in good faith gets something wrong vis-a-vis
the CC conditions, whether from the start or later shouldn't make a
difference. The adopter is then at some point made aware of the problem
and gets 30 days to fix it, regardless of whether they had in fact
validly been granted rights before or not. Right?

As the violation-from-the-start cases are IMO much more frequent than
the others, maybe the word "reinstate" is the only thing that would need
to be changed? Is there an alternative suitable term for it in English,
something without the "re"?

Best
John