Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Robin Sheat <robin AT kallisti.net.nz>]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 15:37, David Underwood wrote:
> But the advice from a lawyer friend of mine is that it falls under  
> contract law, since a person implicitly accepts the terms of the  
> license when they read/ listen/ view the CC'd material. So on that  
> basis it should be enforcable.
I'm no lawyer, but that's not how I understood copyright worked. I always 
thought it started off with no permissions, i.e. "you can't copy or 
create derivative works of this", and then the author could add 
allowances onto this, effectively giving permission in specific cases, 
i.e. "you can copy this only if you are standing on one foot", or "you 
can copy and create derivative works only if you allow others to do the 
same under the same terms". However, most of what I know of copyright 
comes from reading things about the US system. 

There is (afaik) nothing that provides a limit on what a person may do 
with a work, provided they don't violate the set of 'what copyright 
restricts minus what the author allows'. You can't say "you can only read 
this book standing on your head", as reading it isn't covered by 
copyright.

(for ease of writing, I'm referring to 'author' as 'copyright holder' 
here, they aren't always the same)

I'd like to see this confirmed or corrected however, I tend to think like 
a programmer, and things aren't always that logical :)

-- 
Robin <robin AT kallisti.net.nz> JabberID: <eythian AT jabber.kallisti.net.nz>

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