Cc-uk mailing list

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 11:23AM, Prodromos Tsiavos 
<prodromos.tsiavos AT socio-legal-studies.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:

>(b)    Compatibility with the Canadian and Australian CC licences. The 
>drafting team of Australia is ?rightly- concerned with UK, Canada and 
>Australia 
>adopting a common policy concerning the issue of moral rights. Canada has 
>chosen to waive the moral rights, but I am slightly concerned with the 
>implementation of their solution (check the document concerning CC-UK moral 
>rights position)

MORAL RIGHTS.
-------------

The Canadian solution does have the ambiguity of the attribution removal 
fudge from CC-2.0 . This was criticised (or at least caused confusion) on 
cc-license-discuss as well as debian-legal. And it does go against the CC 
principle of "more certainty less lawyers" mentioned in the document.

I think it's telling that the focus groups accepted that if you're committing 
to derivation then you have to be willing to take the risk of your work being 
mistreated. The CC licenses are designed to express and embody a commitment 
to a particular principle, that of Freedom (in the "Free Software" sense), 
and other very important principles may need to take a background role or 
even be excluded to enable that.

If someone is worried about their reputation (or worried about being on the 
receiving end of cruelty, which I can easily imagine would be a concern for 
very personal works) they really should make the work ND. This could even 
work to their advantage. One can CC-NC one's work to publicise it whilst 
reserving the right to commercial exploitation, so one could CC-ND one's work 
to publicise it whilst reserving the right to derivation.

I really, really, really don't think there should be an IN module. Enforcing 
and managing this adds too much drag and fragmentation to the process of 
derivation.

I also think that the black hole effect has to be avoided at all costs. See 
how BSD authors object to their code winding up in GPL projects. I don't want 
to be forced to let an IN project use my work then have them object to my use 
of something they've built on my work. I'm meant to be in control of *my* 
rights with CC.

Rather than looking to the rest of Europe, I think the baseline has to be the 
original US licenses that the iCommons projects are porting. How would those 
react to the black hole scenarios described in the document? If the 
Continental EU licenses have got it wrong (with the benefit of hindsight and 
from a *derivation* point of view, I appreciate that they have it right from 
a *Moral Rights* position and in the case of Germany a *Legal* position), 
that is something that can be solved in the future.

As Lessig said in his UCL talk, this is something the UK can get right.

THE CA LICENSE
--------

It would be wonderful to have a CC-compatible BBC-CA-compliant license, but 
the black hole effect would surely apply here as well. I don't really want to 
pay in CC'd content for access to a noncommercial license that I've already 
paid for with my license fees if I don't have to. ;-) If the CA and CC 
licenses can be modularised so that understanding one helps understand the 
other and they can share mindshare, that would be a good achievement. 

Is there any way the CA license can be like the Open Gaming License? That 
allows the licensor to mark sections of the product as "product identity" 
(essentially branding), not Open and not derivable even though the rest of 
the product is Open. So under an OGL-style license I could download an 
episode of "Only Fools And Horses" and mix any views of Peckham with my CC 
work, but not shots of Del Boy or Rodney. Using any logos would be right out.

Are there any hooks that can be put into either license that would make it 
easier for them to work together in the future if the CA gets more liberal 
licensing?

THE CC LICENSE
--------------

This is a wonderfully clear license.

Comments:

2.1 Can this be made multi-sentence at all?
2.1.1 The license does not define the term URI. 
2.5 Is it worth mentioning the right of integrity (or at least the word 
"integrity" so as not scare anyone) by name for removal of doubt?
7.1 This is a bad clause. See the discussion on cc-license-discuss (and 
probably debian-legal as well). It goes against the spirit of CC, appears to 
limit fair dealing, and should be removed. IIRC CC didn't object to the idea 
of it being removed from future licenses, and some people called for a 2.01 
license just to remove this clause.

The validating URI idea (as expressed in Lessig's DMCA takedown hack 
discussion in the Q&A from his UCL talk) is a very, very, very bad one (see 
the FSF's recommendation that you include the text of the CC license with 
licensed works). It's bad enough that I can revoke a license on a whim by 
erasing a page on my web site. It's dangerously bad that my ISP can revoke 
the license by being bought up by AOL and moving the URLs of my licenses, or 
by having a server crash on the day a work is performed... If this can be 
removed, or de-emphasised to be more obviously just one option alongside 
reading or displaying the lciense, that would be much better.

- Rob.