A license is, specifically, not a contract.
Tom Morton
On 11 Apr 2012, at 18:30, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 6:50 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 04/11/2012 06:45 AM, Sarah wrote:
Can anyone point me to the basis of the claim that cc licences are irrevocable? If someone were to upload an image to Flickr with a cc non-commercial licence, then changed her mind and broadened it to allow commercial use, Commons would not reject the image on the grounds that the first, more restrictive, licence was irrevocable.
Granting a license means opening a legal door. Granting another license means opening another door, and this is okay. That is called "dual licensing" and the famous example is MySQL software. But irrevocable means you're not allowed to close the first door.
The people who reuse your content based on the first license, must still be allowed to do this. If you try to sue them for reusing your content under a license that you now regret, they are safe because you granted them an irrevocable license.
Thank you for the explanation. As I mentioned earlier, surely only adults can grant irrevocable licences. Huge numbers of our uploaders are under the age of consent. We ask all kinds of questions before allowing people to upload (are you the author, has your work been published before, etc), but we don't ask "are you over 18?"
Many of the rest of the uploaders aren't paying attention, and often the authors aren't the uploaders, but have consented by email without realizing what they're agreeing to.
What we're discussing here is whether Commons should respect people who wish to regret having granted irrevocable licenses. Legally they may (or may not) be able to claim they didn't understand what they were doing. But then Commons could respect such wishes even if there is no legal demand.
Yes, indeed, but as we see, they don't.
Sarah
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