that people promote awareness of Creative Commons licensing options in Flickr. I agree with him in principle - but there’s a problem. As far as I can tell, a US CC license on Canadian-origin content is probably invalid, in particular since there are CC Canada licenses available. Should Flickr (and Six Apart and others) not provide international customers with an equal opportunity to add such a license?
Update: Anil Dash commented that Six Apart has added such support to Movable Type 3.2.
Boris suggests
July 22nd, 2005 | Boris Anthony • Canada • Creative Commons • Flickr
9 comments ↓
Excellent point. I shall notify the proper authorities… :)
I have in fact been thinking about this from some time and opened a help ticket at 6A on this very issue in MT. So today I was prompted to write an email to the name on the contact page for CC CA to ask about this. We’ll see if he is able to respond.
Let me know what you hear…
We’ve added support for international CC licenses in MT 3.2.
That’s fantastic, Anil, thanks for the info.
Btw on a related, nobody has replied to the reuse of all content (of weblogs) or partial content in a commercial context. :)
This is _not_ a question of fair use.
I wonder also how far the ShareAlike goes. Still in the same example, let’s say that a weblog is making marketing analysis, data mining, etc using the content to sell it. Should their analysis be shared alike. :)
One thing that is important is that law is not like geometry or math. Courts will rule differently on the same issue, commons law in the US evolves without additional laws being created… and fair use is something that you have to defend in court. It doesn’t prevent you from being sued. The issue of what constitutes commercial use is a difficult question and one that we don’t have consensus on. The various national licenses are slightly different, but are essentially the same. You could feasibly use a license from one country in the court of another country, since a great deal of this is about the expression of the intent of the author.
There are various people trying to work on how to mark up the components and layers of content with different licenses. The difficulty is that if it gets to complex, it will be harder for people to understand.
The edge cases will always be difficult and the courts will have to decide in the end. The key is to get the majority of the work properly marked.
Unless you’re very concerned about moral rights, which is a difficult issue across different countries, I wouldn’t worry about which region the license is from as much as choosing the right license category. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I think this is the practical thing to do.
I can’t give you details now, but we are working on various aspects of the issue of transnational licensing. I’ll try to blog something about this as soon as we have a few of the pieces sorted out. It will get easier and more clear, but I don’t think it’s critically “broken” right now.
All you get by choosing this or that international cc licence is a hint. I could create something as a Canadian, release it with the US licence, and a Mexican could use it. If there’s a problem, it could be handled in a court anywhere on the planet, in Italy, for instance. In practice, it would probably be resolved in Canada or Mexico, using the US licence has a guide. Canadian or Mexican copyright law would need to be considered too, of course, since the licence cannot impose more restrictions then the law.
Why do we have so many international licences to choose from then ? Because if I’m Canadian I’ll probably use a Canadian licence and my work has a lot of chances of being reused by a Canadian. And so, the licence was specifically adapted to clarify clauses according to my country’s legal system.
I hope I didn’t confuse you more…
Great comments everyone, and I should have noted in my post that I considered this more of an academic issue than a practical issue. As Joi posted, the most important thing is a clear expression of intention, and that is accomplished with any CC license.