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Creative Commons License held up in court

March 18th, 2006

Creative Commons Licenses Enforced in Dutch Court

The proceedings arose when former MTV VJ and podcasting guru Adam Curry published photos of his family on the well-known online photo-sharing site Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. The Dutch tabloid Weekend reproduced four of the photos in a story about Curry’s children.

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).

Comment is free

March 14th, 2006

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A collective comment blog launched by Guardian Unlimited.

It will incorporate all the regular Guardian and Observer main commentators, many blogging for the first time, who will be joined by a host of outside contributors – politicians, academics, writers, scientists, activists and of course existing bloggers to debate, argue and occasionally agree on the issues of the day.

Why are we launching it now? Because it’s obvious to us that our major competition for opinion and debate is moving online, and unless we move with it, we’re failing our journalists and future generations of readers.

my emphasis

Guardian has consistently been one of the most flexible newspaper institutions around. This is just one step forward. Our newspapers however are still not getting it.