On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 7/17/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)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separate discussion about the wording of the moral rights clause in a
newer version of the license.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