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Creative Commons License Flaws Claimed
bloosqr writes "Dan Heller, in a series of three articles, claims to have found a number of problems with the Creative Commons license, particularly within the realm of photography. In the first article he states there is a problem with people relicensing copyrighted work under the CC license and having subsequent users of that copyrighted work sued by the original owner. In the second article he fleshes out these ideas and states that there is an increased risk of being sued if you use a CC license. Finally, in the third article, he states that people can 'game the CC license' for profit, by suing people who use your CC'd work which you have subsequently revoked from the CC license. This series of blogs has generated a fair amount of discussion on several photography forums, and I would like for the Slashdot community to clarify matters."
Which CC license is he talking about, and which of them actually permit revocation?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
First, how often does that really happen?
Second, why is this a problem with CC? It would be a problem with anyone placing a copyrighted work under any license, or even claiming copyright on a work copyrighted by someone else. It's more a problem with copyright and the legal system.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
You know, I thought that if you license it as creative commons then all derivative works and the like from that work must also be CC
Well, from the faq: What if I change my mind?
Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work. So seriously, you may well be right with the first two issues but this third concept is foreign to me and I'm sure many lawyers would be interested in how you 'revoked?' a license. What the?
I think a lot of these issues would be resolved by making it "no backsies, all derivatives must be CC, tough if you want to use them no lawsuits plz k thanx bye." And that's the best legalese I know.
My work here is dung.
I LOL'd.
If you encourage people to use your work, and then try to pull the rug out from them by revoking their license, you can sue them for "reliance". Judges don't like that business model.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I am not so sure that this is so much an isuee of Creative Commons, as it is the gray void that is relicensing. You should only be applying the CC to your own work and if you are applying the CC to something else, then you should responsible for the fallout, especially if the license is incompatible with the original.
I think the gist of the article is thus:
Owner A has photo
B releases A under CC to X,Y,Z
A sues X,Y,Z, but really B is to blame.
The game is that, I could take one of my friend's photos, and put it up on the likes of Wikipedia. Then, my friend turns around and sues Wikipedia for infringement. In other words, the claim is that the license somehow makes it possible to "game the system", but, as you already pointed out, I don't see how that isn't possible with any license.
This is my sig.
There's a whole other issue with photos and videos separate from copyright: getting a model release from the people shown in the picture. See this earlier case of Virgin Mobile Australia using a CC licensed photo off Flickr in an ad campaign.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/22/0319252
As far as I can tell, DHINAL (Dan Heller is not a lawyer). Why would I worry about his opinions, rather than the well informed opinion of Lawrence Lessig, the law professor who actually founded the Creative Commons, and uses the licenses extensively?
Welcome to the digital age, where information is free to be copied everywhere, without loss of the original.
And that applies to anything that can be put in digital form: text, software, images, sound, video, and photography.
If you don't want your precious piece of information to be used by others, then just don't put it available to the public. Period.
The very term "intellectual property" doesn't make sense.
factor 966971: 966971
??!!!??!!
Do you actually think that the /. community contains anything but dangerous and specious interpretations of legal matters?
What next?
You're going to write to a Garden community to ask for medical advice?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The other problem is the issue of model release, and I agree that a lot of people who CC license their work don't know about that.
Bruce Perens.
I don't understand why the Creative Commons license is being singled out as vulnerable to this sort of problem. Anyone, anywhere, could buy content from one entity who claims to have a copyright on it, then get hit with a lawsuit by another entity who disputes the copyright. Creative Commons is no more and no less subject to the problem.
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don't really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it's not for money, there's far less implications for somebody using my images.
Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you've clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you're okay with me, but it doesn't mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody's likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it's very different when you're talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
From the blurb: I would like for the Slashdot community to clarify matters.
Yeah, and people in hell want iced water.
Seriously? This is not the place to look for anything substantial. Most Slashdotters are not lawyers (myself included). Few know the actual law and even less are able to separate the standing law from their Utopian ideals. Slashdot makes Wikipedia look like an absolute braintrust in comparison.
And that's not to say that people shouldn't express themselves. Not at all. What it is to say is that if you're looking for the solid leggings of today's law this simply isn't the right place to look. Tons of posters have all kinds of good ideas and good intentions but that's not going to get you anywhere if you find yourself standing in front of a judge. There is a lot of talk on Slashdot about change in the laws involving IP but so far I haven't seen anything aside from talk. From time to time I like to call one of the more vocal anti-IP talkers out and tell them why don't they openly break the law and let me know how their reasoning works out in court. I have yet to find anyone who takes up this challenge. Regardless of where we stand on IP law, we all know the basic truth behind it and all the intellectual masturbation that goes on around here doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the face of the reality of the situation.
And to be very honest, most of the ideals that people spread around involving the lessening or even revoking of IP laws simply can't stand up in our society. We have far too much riding on this structure and drastic changes to that structure are going to cause wide spread hardship. I don't think that today's society is built out of the kind of people who are willing to bear hardship for any real length of time to right the wrongs of yesteryear.
It's going to be both a sad and comic day if most of the changes that people suggest and support around here ever come into being. If we want serious change that isn't going to leave itself open to short term corruption we're all going to have to take a loss. Most people here don't care about loss until it's their loss that we're talking about. The revolution will not be on Slashdot.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This doesn't illustrate any problem at all with CC -- it's just run-of-the-mill IP infringement. The fact that TFA doesn't bother citing any examples of anyone actually being sued for this is telling -- fact is, no one would ever get sued except possibly the person committing the original crime. The worst that might happen is a cease-and-desist letter getting sent.
Dan Heller poses a great question. After describing a situation where only 2 of 500 polled students thought downloading a copyrighted work was wrong, he asks:
What do we do about a society that is already predisposed to ignoring copyright in the first place?
The answer is simply this: where the law fails to reflect the will of the people it is the law, not the people, which is in error.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I do more work in software, so am not the best one to explain this, although I'm sure there are legal guides for photographers.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
CC isn't a copyright - it's a distribution license.
A lincensor who grants a gratuitous licens (not just the CC, but the GPL and other OSS licenses) can do that (at least in US law) whether or not the license terms say they won't or can't. At most, such a representation may have a bearing on whether the ability of the licensor to recover for copyright violation from a former licensee who detrimentally relied on the promise not to revoke are limited by the doctrine of estoppel.
If you want a license that really can't be revoked, you ought to get a license contract rather than relying on a gratuitous license.
Actually, there is no automatic assumption that a model needs to be paid if their image will be used commercially*. The purpose of a model release is not about the model's right to compensation, but about ensuring that they don't dispute the purpose of the photo, i.e. that they consent that their photo be used in a commercial application. There's also the trade practices laws concept of 'passing off' - basically, if you use a particular person's photo in an advertisement for a product, it is implied in law that they support that product. If done without their consent, you are 'passing off' their support. In a model release, you would typically ask a model to agree that their photo might be used in commercial purposes.
Separately, you can generally take someone's photo and sell it or publish it without their permission (think of how many millions of photos of politicians, celebrities, criminals, etc are published in newspapers and magazines every day). You don't need to get a model release for every one of those people. There are some limitations to do with people's privacy, but that's the general rule.
* Though presumably there is a general need for a model to receive consideration for their model release to have force as a contract