Creative Commons License held up in court
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Creative Commons Licenses Enforced in Dutch Court
Curry sued Weekend for copyright and privacy infringement. As to the copyright claim, Weekend argued that it was misled by the notice ‘this photo is public’ (which is a standard feature of all Flickr images that are viewable by the public), and that the link to the CC license was not obvious. Weekend had assumed that no authorization from Curry was needed. Audax, the publisher of Weekend, argued that it was informed of the existence of the CC license only much later by its legal counsel.
The Court rejected Weekend’s defense
…However, it may be expected from a professional party like Audax that it conduct a thorough and precise examination before publishing in Weekend photos originating from the Internet. Had it conducted such an investigation, Audax would have clicked on the symbol accompanying the notice ‘some rights reserved’ and encountered the (short version of) the License.
my emphasis
It’s nice to see that the court didn’t ignore the CC licence.
But there’s another, far more important, lesson to be learned here . I actually do believe that the magazine was confused regarding the copyright like they claimed in their defense. However there probably was one other factor not only the ‘this photo is public’ but the fact that there are so (too) many CC licences.
I bet 90% of people never click on the CC link to see the specific terms of the licence but simply assume it’s a “free for all” type of deal. That’s dangerous and in my opinion the biggest problem of Creative Commons. It’s also the main reason why I don’t want to publish my photos under CC (even the most restrictive one there is).
