iSummit legal day - liveblog 3
CC legal day session 3 - enforcement
Key points from Lessig talk
Discussed the reasons for retiring CC licences, most recently the stand alone developing nations and most of the sampling licences. Main two reasons — lack of use and the possibility of publishers using DevNations to avoid publishing under a “true” open access licence.
Advertising. Can you use NonCommercial (NC) content on a site with ads? They are thinking of adding a “switch” where users, when they licence their work under NC, will select whether or not they want to allow adverts on the site.
Noncommercial - what does it mean? CC is trying to do a study on what users think about when they see “non-commercial”. This was an issue that we explored in the CIE study, and I think this is very important. The big issue that I spotted in this study was that many people thought that NC gave free reign to non-profit organisations. I argued that an equally valid interpretation is that non-commercial applies to the use of the work — similar to the analysis for commercial or non-commercial use as one of the factors in fair use in the US.
Lessig advised everyone that CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are now included the Free Software Foundation’s list of approved licences. This is a pretty big deal, as Stallman and the foundation had several objections about CC.
He also noted that it could be (or is) a huge problem if people use the unported licence rather than the jurisdiction specific licences. He thought that maybe we should call it “uncooked” or “raw” in an effort to get people to think that they shouldn’t use it.
On the future. Crossover is key between getting more people to use CC — getting businesses and orgs to use CC. One of the ways to do this might be to encourage these orgs to use just a few of the CC licences. One example is Eyevio, a video sharing site in Japan.
Andres Guadamuz of the AHRC Research Centre gave a talk about enforcement. Key points:
- The licence / contract situation. This is a civil law versus common law issue, that I will explore further for readers at a later date.
- Clickwrap, browsewrap, and embed wrap - do these make CC as a contract valid? This is a possible line of attack as well.
- He also updated everyone as to the situation in Spain and the recent legal action over use of CC and licensing schemes for playing music in bars and restaurants.
Lessig followed up with some comments questioning whether or not the licence/contract issue would ever come up in a way where it would make a difference. More on this in the next liveblog post on IPL.
