Cc-uk mailing list

[David Harris <cc-uk AT ukitlaw.com>]

On Tuesday 13 July 2004 09:27, Cory Doctorow wrote:
> My feeling is that a licenses that breaks compatibility with the CC-US
> license could do a lot of harm:
>[snip]
> * New works will not be able to freely mix material from the US and UK
>[snip]
> * Creators will have to decide if they want to grant the UK freedoms or

I really like the plain english drafting.

As many other lawyers on the list will no doubt point out the compatibility 
issue is a rather profound problem that more generally afflicts international 
commerce. Laws around the World differ not just in language but in their 
underlying spirit (policy would be more correct). Talk of porting a licence 
makes a for a deceptive analogy: geeks may well port code from x86 CPU 
architecture to IA64 or ARM but legal systems are not CPUs and not so 
amenable.

Blending works under what may be conflicting CC licences may or may not give 
rise to the problems Cory says. But short of having a clause in all CC 
licences that enables a work to yield its current licence to another CC 
variant I'm not sure how you would deal with it. In simple cases it may be 
that people will choose one licence over another and use that instead of 
their national licence. That would have the same effect as a choice of law 
clause in a contract and give the same problems: it will work fine in that 
country but it may not be applicable in another jurisdiction with a differing 
policy. In any event, and I may have misunderstood Cory's point, clause 3 
addresses compound work issues by providing for multiple licence 
applicability for composite works. If I mix a CC-US work into my CC-UK work 
then the licence for my work is the UK one but the embedded US work retains 
the US licence.

In short,. it might be nice to keep to the spirit of the US licence and as 
others have said this should be done There are however going to have to be 
some variations in national licences that breach the letter and spirit of the 
US one because they have to in order to be legally valid. Try arguing to a 
French or German court that moral rights are a subservient licence provision. 
I am with Christian on that point.

typo: para 4. E.; "including ay notice" should be "including any notice" 

David Harris