On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 7/17/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
At a minimum, I think Creative Commons needs to make an official statement clarifying its intentions. However, this isn't sufficient. The intent of the license author is going to have minimal sway in court; what will be material is the *exact text*, the understanding of the licensee, and the understanding of the licensor.
I agree we need more clarity on this issue. Moral rights may seem like a harmless protection, but in practice, authors & copyright holders have frequently sued exactly under moral rights provisions to prevent what many would consider entirely legitimate parody / "fair use". Surely we should strive to ensure that the licenses grant as much freedom to re-users as possible.
On the other hand, I'm not happy with the CC 3.0 licenses being "banned" from Wikimedia Commons. That seems like a drastic step where simply more discussion and possibly some rewording of the license text is required. If CC takes the official stance "We wish to protect author's moral rights in our licenses", that's a different story. But none of the public statements regarding the licenses seem to be going in this direction.
Given the legal answers provided in this thread, I support CC 3.0 being fully permitted on Wikimedia Commons, independently from a separate discussion about the wording of the moral rights clause in a newer version of the license. Regardless, I've asked Mike Godwin to weigh in if he wants to.
How about this: * CC 3.0 is permitted on Commons... * ... but until we have clarification, it will not be put into the select box of licenses on the upload page. So, anyone using CC 3.0 has to put it in the text manually, which should mean they know what they're doing. * Also, the CC 3.0 template should contain a "warning" towards the moral rights issue, so reusers can't say they didn't know about this.
Once there is an official statement by CC that clears CC 3.0 for "full" use on Commons, we can treat it as any other valid license.
Cheers, Magnus