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 ....................................................................................................... 102 b. Moral rights ............................................................................................................ 104 c. Representation of non-infringement ...................................................................... 106 d. Collecting societies ................................................................................................ 109 5. Conclusion: options to mitigate risks and improve compatibility ..................................... 111 5.1 Improve the interface ................................................................................................... 111 5.1.1 Develop more technologies to support the licenses’ requirements ....................... 111 5.1.2 Remodel the acceptation infrastructure ................................................................ 113 5.1.3 Reverse the system’s logic ...................................................................................