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  • From: "Andrew Katz" <andrew AT thekatzfamily.co.uk>
  • To: <cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Cc-uk] Re: Cc-uk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 10
  • Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 17:26:20 +0100

Re Prodromos's licences : I like the way this is shaping up. Apologies if the following points have already been picked up:

Intro: the word "licence" should be spelt "license" in the penultimate line (verb form rather than noun form). I always found this hard to remember, and then two mnemonics came along at one: "you can "c" a noun"; and think of "advice" and "advise" (the key is in the pronunciation).

1. "Licence": see my comments below about "agreement"


2.1.3 I'm delighted that the DRM clause is in here, but the DRM doesn't alter or restrict the terms of the licence or any rights granted under it, it just restricts the ability of any person to exercise the rights. If we add at the end of 2.1.3 "...or have the effect or intent of restricting the ability of any person to exercise those Rights". I can see an issue arising here, however: if the work is incorporated into a collective work which is then sold for money (assuming non-commecial use isn't specified here) then this could be construed to be a restriction on the licence and therefore impermissible. This problem exists irresspective of my suggested amendment to 2.1.3

2.1.4 It may be that the Licensor is not the Original Author. I would say that it was the Original Author who is entitled to attribution, not necessarily the Licensor.

2.5 Apologies if we've been down this route already, but I don't want this to amount to a waiver of the independent right of the author to claim for defamation . The scope of this clause should be limited to the specific moral right in question. We could say "any other act in relation to the Work". Could someone enlighten me as to what sort of things are envisaged to be covered by the wording "or to any other act that me otherwise prejudicial to his/her reputation"? (incidentally the numbering of 2.4 and 2.5 seems to have got transposed).

The other point here is that this clause is doing dual duty and is a little confused. If the Original Author is the Licensor, then this is a waiver by that person. All well and good. If the Original Author is not the Licensor (i.e. the copyright has been assigned to the Licensor by the Original Author) then I would interpret this as a representation by the Licensor that the moral right has been waived by the Original Author. If it turns out that this is untrue, then this would amount to a breach of contract.

3.1 I need to have a think about this (and refer back to the relevant legislation) but I have an urge to add the hideously ugly wording: "except where you are a consumer as defined in the Consumer Transactions (Restriction on Statements) Order 1976 in which case nothing in this licence is intended to limit your statutory rights". I need to check the exent to which this is relevant, but I feel it might cause issues where the licence is applied to a physical object such as a book in which case this attempt to exclude liability (if the seller is the Licensor) would amount to a criminal offence. As I say, I need to think this through a bit.

5.1 Since there is no right to sublicense, I'm not sure that the second sentence is necessary.

6.2 I'm concerned you'll all groan at this one as I'm coming to this cold and I'm sure this has been discussed already....but are we sure this an agreement (in which case we need some consideration wording) and not a bare licence?

6.4 We've already had comments about confusion of jurisdictions. We might also like to allow the licence to be used in the Isle of Man (which adopts the English law of copyright but is not part of the United Kingdom). I don't know about the status of the Channel Islands.

7.1 Can we lose the apostrophe in the fourth line?



Generally: there is a bit of confusion in terminology between "User" (not defined), "Rightsholder" (Not defined) and "You"


Again, this probably shows my naivety but I understood that the CC licences were not issued under a CC licence (since we don't want people creating derivative works). I assume we have the consent of Creative Commons to fiddle with their base licence to produce the BBC licence.


Hope these are constructive comments to what I think is a great piece of drafting!

Best wishes

Andrew.





----- Original Message ----- From: <cc-uk-request AT lists.ibiblio.org>
To: <cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 5:02 PM
Subject: Cc-uk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 10


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Today's Topics:

1. Correction (Prodromos Tsiavos)
2. Re: New licences and the Integrity right (Jonathan Mitchell)
3. Re: New licences and the Integrity right (Rob Myers)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 11:30:11 +0100 (BST)
From: Prodromos Tsiavos
<prodromos.tsiavos AT socio-legal-studies.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: [Cc-uk] Correction
To: cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <20041011103011.18FCC2263D AT webmail218.herald.ox.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain

I just saw my posting...

I wrote "The issues we are currently phasing are:"

meant

"The issues we are currently facing are:"

thanks
prodromos


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:19:30 +0100
From: Jonathan Mitchell <website3 AT jonathanmitchell.info>
Subject: Re: [Cc-uk] New licences and the Integrity right
To: "'cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org'" <cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <BD902AD2.375A%website3 AT jonathanmitchell.info>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

I am sorry I have not had the time to comment on version 3 of the CCUK draft
which was circulated on 21 September (incidentally the website still has
version 1 as the current draft for comments, which is unfortunate as there
have been several exhortations to go there to view the current version). Two
unrelated points on today's proposals.

1.The versions of proposed licence distributed today give rights to "view,
edit, modify, translate and distribute Works within the United Kingdom ".
Surely the last four words (repeated at several points) should be deleted
and 'worldwide' substituted? Take a website uploaded by a UK licensor to a
French server and viewed in Germany by somebody who wishes to quote the
contents in Poland. How could this language apply?

2. Clause 6.4 states "This Licence shall be governed by the law of England
and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the parties irrevocably submit
to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of England and Wales, Scotland
and Northern Ireland." Now, at present there are not many material
differences between the three systems (though clause 6.3 flags one and there
are others). But:
(a) how is it conceptually possible for a licence to be governed by three
systems of law simultaneously?
(b) isn't this indeed likely to lead to argument between a user and the
licensor as to what the applicable law is ?(see Beximco Pharmaceuticals Ltd
& Ors v Shamil Bank of Bahrain EC [2004] EWCA Civ 19 at
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2004/19.html for an example of the
unnecessary difficulties in attempts to use two systems of law
simultaneously)
(c ) there is no 'exclusive jurisdiction' if three jurisdictions are being
submitted to. This appears to be intended to give anyone suing on the
contract a choice of the three, so if an English licensor is in a dispute
with an American user the user could sue in Scotland or Ireland if he/she
chose: schedule 4 of the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982 as
amended provides " 12. - (1) If the parties have agreed that a court or the
courts of a part of the United Kingdom are to have jurisdiction to settle
any disputes which have arisen or which may arise in connection with a
particular legal relationship, and, apart from this Schedule, the agreement
would be effective to confer jurisdiction under the law of that part, that
court or those courts shall have jurisdiction." I doubt if any licensor
would wish to go out of their own jurisdiction; and why should they?

Now I know I have made this point already more than once. The licence will
have to have a number of menu choices anyway as to rights of use. Wouldn't
it be simplest just to have each of these in three editions for the three
jurisdictions? There are other ways of doing this.


Jonathan
--
Jonathan Mitchell QC

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------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:51:20 +0100
From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
Subject: Re: [Cc-uk] New licences and the Integrity right
To: Prodromos Tsiavos
<prodromos.tsiavos AT socio-legal-studies.oxford.ac.uk>
Cc: cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <7724478.1097495480591.JavaMail.robmyers AT mac.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

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.





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  • [Cc-uk] Re: Cc-uk Digest, Vol 9, Issue 10, Andrew Katz, 10/14/2004

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