A court in Israel found that taking CC-licensed pictures from Flickr and publishing them in a book violated the copyright in each and every picture separately. (Source: www.law.co.il, including a link to the decision in Hebrew).
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A court in Israel found that taking CC-licensed pictures from Flickr and publishing them in a book violated the copyright in each and every picture separately. (Source: www.law.co.il, including a link to the decision in Hebrew).
If you have ever actually read through a software end user license agreement, you know that they are often full of restrictions on how you can use the software. Typically, the agreement states that the license to use the software is contingent upon compliance with all of those restrictions. If you violate any of those provisions, you are breaching the agreement. But are you also committing copyright infringement? According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, it depends.
In its recent opinion in MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment, the Ninth Circuit held that violation of a provision in a license agreement is only copyright infringement if the provision violated has a "nexus" to one of the exclusive rights granted under copyright law -- reproduction, public performance or display, distribution, and creation of derivative works. That means, for example, that failure to obey a license provision prohibiting cheating in a copyrighted video game is not copyright infringement. But violation of a prohibition on creating derivative works of the game would be. This holding has important implications. As EFF has pointed out, the court's decision will help prevent copyright owners from using copyright law to enforce onerous requirements on licensees. (Copyright law provides much stronger legal remedies than contract law.) But on the other hand, it is not clear what the decision means for public licensing schemes.
Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at Intellectual Property Law Research, at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town Law School.
Flickr has been offering users the ability to search by Creative Commons license since mid-2006, and I've been waiting for Yahoo to implement such a feature in their image search for quite a while.
As reported by Lessig and others, the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded yesterday a ruling by the Northern District of California which denied the copyright claims of an open source software developer for violations of the Artistic License. This is a landmark decision which is likely to influence all types of free licensing, including Creative Commons licenses and the question of enforceability of copyright claims upon violation of free licenses in general. Here are four quick points on the decision:
Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas.
After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.
Lessig is giving a final talk at Stanford University on the subject, and it is being recorded for the upcoming feature film "Basement Tapes", an open source documentary (see http://www.opensourcecinema.org). Guests will also be treated to a sneak preview of some upcoming scenes from Basement Tapes, and re-mixed work from the Open Source Cinema website.
Please come and give Professor Lessig our appreciation and for a last chance to witness this enlightening and provocative presentation.
Event is free to the public. Everyone is welcome.
You can RSVP here.
Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website).
Over the last 3-4 years many people have been speculating about how U.S. courts would interpret the Creative Commons (CC) licenses in litigation concerning their legal operation and effect. There are several reported cases in Europe, but to my knowledge, none so far in the U.S. Due to the popularity of the CC licenses, it was only a question of time before someone would try to enforce (or challenge) them in court. In the first occasion it actually happened, the claim took a quite unanticipated turn.
In a fresh law review article Prof. Lydia Pallas Loren explores a number of interesting issues concerning Creative Commons licensing.
Watch the new "Wanna Work Together" video (3 min), and click on the ad!
In catching up on some email and other odds and end this holiday weekend, I came upon this totally cool email from Larry Lessig about how Creative Commons is fund raising through Revver. Lessig writes:
