Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solutions Melanie Dulong de Rosnay To cite this version: Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solu- tions. 2009. halshs-00671622 HAL Id: halshs-00671622 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00671622 Submitted on 17 Feb 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION LAW Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solutions Melanie Dulong de Rosnay Institute for Information Law University of Amsterdam Version 1.1 20 December 2010 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Nederland license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nl/ TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword .................................................................................................................................... 1 Executive summary .................................................................................................................... 2 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 7 1.1 Sources of legal incompatibilities .................................................................................... 9 1.2 Scope, methodology and outline .................................................................................... 10 2. Creative Commons licenses diversity .................................................................................. 13 2.1 Creative Commons: an organization and a set of licenses ............................................. 15 2.1.1 The licensing infrastructure: a technical standard .................................................. 15 2.1.2 Creative Commons policy strategy: not quite a legal standard ............................... 18 2.2 The different licenses available ..................................................................................... 20 2.2.1 The licenses formats ............................................................................................... 20 2.2.2 The license elements ............................................................................................... 25 i. Attribution (BY) ...................................................................................................... 27 ii. Share Alike (SA) .................................................................................................... 30 iii. Non Commercial (NC) .......................................................................................... 31 iv. No Derivative (ND) ............................................................................................... 34 v. Instruments Outside The Core Suite .................................................................... 35 2.2.3 The main clauses ..................................................................................................... 39 i. Definitions ................................................................................................................ 41 a. Work ..................................................................................................................... 41 b. Adaptation ............................................................................................................ 43 c. Collection ............................................................................................................. 44 d. Rights: Reproduce, Distribute and Publicly Perform .......................................... 45 e. The parties: the Licensor, the Original Author and You ...................................... 47 ii. Fair Dealing Rights .................................................................................................. 48 iii. License Grant .......................................................................................................... 48 iv. Restrictions ............................................................................................................. 49 v. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer & vi. Limitation on Liability ............ 51 vii. Termination ............................................................................................................ 51 viii. Miscellaneous ....................................................................................................... 52 2.3 The legal nature of the licenses ...................................................................................... 53 2.3.1 Unilateral permissions or contractual agreements? ................................................ 54 2.3.2 Consent to online non-negotiated texts ................................................................... 57 2.3.3 Transmission of obligations to third parties ............................................................ 63 3. Sources of potential incompatibility .................................................................................... 67 3.1 Incompatibility between different formats ..................................................................... 69 3.2 Incompatibility among different versions ...................................................................... 72 3.2.1 From 1.0 to 2.0, in May 2004 ................................................................................. 72 a) Attribution becomes standard .................................................................................. 72 b) Share Alike compatibility with future and international versions ........................... 73 c) Link-back attribution requirement ........................................................................... 74 d) Synchronization and music rights ............................................................................ 74 e) Limited warranties: the hidden risk of infringement ............................................... 74 3.2.2 From 2.0 to 2.5, in June 2005 ................................................................................. 75 a) Attribution to authors or other parties ...................................................................... 75 3.2.3 From 2.5 to 3.0, in February 2007 .......................................................................... 76 a) Attribution and the no-endorsement clause ............................................................. 76 b) Compatibility structure between BY-SA and other licenses: to be determined ...... 76 c) Internationalization of the generic/unported licenses .............................................. 77 d) Moral rights clause, for international harmonization .............................................. 77 e) Collecting society clause, for international harmonization ..................................... 78 f) TPM language clarification ...................................................................................... 78 g) Database sui generis rights in CCi versions ............................................................ 78 3.3 Incompatibility between different options ..................................................................... 80 3.4 Incompatibility among different jurisdictions ............................................................... 83 3.4.1 Legal porting ........................................................................................................... 84 3.4.2 Internal validity vs. unexpected inconsistencies ..................................................... 85 3.4.3 Representation of non-infringement ....................................................................... 86 3.4.4 Scope of rights ........................................................................................................ 86 3.5 Incompatibility with other open content licenses .......................................................... 88 3.5.1 Cross-licensing: the example of the Free Art License ............................................ 89 3.5.2 Combination of works licensed under non-compatible terms: the Digital Peer Publishing Licenses ......................................................................................................... 92 3.5.3 Dual licensing and relicensing: Wikipedia and the GNU-GFDL ........................... 94 3.5.4 Free Culture core freedoms: defining open license ................................................ 95 4. Impact of the differences between licenses ......................................................................... 98 4.1 Identification of the parties and enforcement ................................................................ 99 4.2 Scope of rights granted ................................................................................................ 100 4.2.1 A difference among formats: Collections and Adaptations ...................................... 101 4.2.2 Differences among jurisdictions ............................................................................... 102 a. Database rights ......................................................................................................