Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solutions
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INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION LAW Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solutions Melanie Dulong de Rosnay Institute for Information Law University of Amsterdam i Version 1.0 1 September 2010 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Nederland license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nl/ ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive summary..................................................................................................................vii 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Sources of legal incompatibilities .................................................................................... 3 1.2 Scope, methodology and outline ...................................................................................... 4 2. Creative Commons licenses diversity .................................................................................... 7 2.1 Creative Commons: an organization and a set of licenses............................................... 9 2.1.1 The licensing infrastructure: a technical standard..................................................... 9 2.1.2 Creative Commons policy strategy: not quite a legal standard............................... 12 2.2 The different licenses available...................................................................................... 14 2.2.1 The licenses formats................................................................................................ 14 2.2.2 The license elements ............................................................................................... 19 i. Attribution (BY)........................................................................................................ 22 ii. Share Alike (SA)...................................................................................................... 24 iii. Non Commercial (NC)............................................................................................ 25 iv. No Derivative (ND)................................................................................................. 28 v. Instruments outside the core suite ............................................................................ 29 2.2.3 The main clauses ..................................................................................................... 33 i. Definitions................................................................................................................. 35 a. Work..................................................................................................................... 35 b. Adaptation ............................................................................................................ 37 c. Collection ............................................................................................................. 38 d. Rights: Reproduce, Distribute and Publicly Perform........................................... 39 e. The parties: the Licensor, the Original Author and You...................................... 40 ii. Fair Dealing Rights .................................................................................................. 41 iii. License Grant.......................................................................................................... 41 iv. Restrictions.............................................................................................................. 42 v. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer & vi. Limitation on Liability............. 44 vii. Termination............................................................................................................ 44 viii. Miscellaneous ....................................................................................................... 45 2.3 The legal nature of the licenses...................................................................................... 46 iii 2.3.1 Unilateral permissions or contractual agreements?................................................. 47 2.3.2 Consent to online non-negotiated texts ................................................................... 50 2.3.3 Transmission of obligations to third parties............................................................ 56 3. Sources of potential incompatibility .................................................................................... 60 3.1 Incompatibility between different formats..................................................................... 62 3.2 Incompatibility between different versions.................................................................... 65 3.2.1 From 1.0 to 2.0 in May 2004................................................................................... 65 a) Attribution becomes standard .................................................................................. 65 b) Share Alike compatibility with future and international versions ........................... 66 c) Link-back attribution requirement ........................................................................... 66 d) Synchronization and music rights............................................................................ 67 e) Limited warranties: the hidden risk of infringement................................................ 67 3.2.2 From 2.0 to 2.5 in June 2005................................................................................... 68 a) Attribution to authors or other parties...................................................................... 68 3.2.3 From 2.5 to 3.0 in February 2007............................................................................ 69 a) Attribution and no endorsement clause.................................................................... 69 b) Compatibility structure between BY-SA and other licenses to be determined ....... 69 c) Internationalization of the generic/unported licenses .............................................. 70 d) Moral rights clause, for international harmonization............................................... 70 e) Collecting society clause, for international harmonization...................................... 70 f) TPM language clarification ...................................................................................... 71 g) Database sui generis rights in CCi versions............................................................. 71 3.3 Incompatibility between different options ..................................................................... 72 3.4 Incompatibility between different jurisdictions ............................................................. 75 3.4.1 The legal porting ..................................................................................................... 76 3.4.2 Internal validity vs. unexpected inconsistencies ..................................................... 77 3.4.3 Representation of non-infringement........................................................................ 78 3.4.4 Scope of rights......................................................................................................... 79 3.5 Incompatibility with other open content licenses........................................................... 81 3.5.1 Cross-licensing: the example of the Free Art License ............................................ 82 3.5.2 Combination of works licensed under non-compatible terms: the Digital Peer Publishing Licenses.......................................................................................................... 84 3.5.3 Dual licensing and re-licensing: Wikipedia and the GNU-GFDL .......................... 87 iv 3.5.4 Free Culture core freedoms: defining Open License .............................................. 88 4. Impact of the differences between licenses.......................................................................... 90 4.1 Identification of the parties and enforcement................................................................. 91 4.2 Scope of rights granted................................................................................................... 92 4.2.1 A difference between formats: Collections and Adaptations...................................... 92 4.2.2 Differences between jurisdictions ............................................................................... 94 a. Database rights ......................................................................................................... 94 b. Moral rights.............................................................................................................. 96 c. Representation of non-infringement......................................................................... 98 d. Collecting societies ................................................................................................ 101 5. Conclusion: options to mitigate risks and improve compatibility...................................... 103 5.1 Improve the interface ................................................................................................... 103 5.1.1 Develop more technologies to better support the licenses requirements .............. 103 5.1.2 Remodel the acceptation infrastructure................................................................. 104 5.1.3 Reverse the logic of the system............................................................................. 106 5.2 Simplify the system.....................................................................................................