Legal/Government

Creative Commons License Issue

Joi asked about a flaw in the Creative Commons licenses:

If I understand this correctly, it means that if I snap a photo of something, someone copies it from my site and posts it and get sued, it comes back to bite me.

Me sense is that this is the way it should be. Tell me if I'm missing something.

I think you have it right, but consider the following scenario:

I snapped a bunch of photos in Tokyo and tossed them onto the net. Let's assume I used the afflicted CC license to release these pictures and one of my pictures has a Coke bottle in it, with the full Coke logo.

Now some artist comes along, snags some of my pictures and incorporates the coke bottle and logo into an artwork. This artwork becomes famous and sells for $100k.

Coke now gets pissy because their trademark got infringed upon and decides to sue the artist, and the artist loses the case and the $100k. The artist can now turn around and sue you for $100k.

I realize that I am originally responsible for putting infringing material on the net -- there is a certain amount of liability I incur there. But its really no big deal, because Coke doesn't have enough resources to go after everyone who puts up infringing material.

But when someone else elevates my mistake to the point where it does make sense for Coke's minions to pay attention, it doesn't make sense to hold the original author of the work (me) liable. This liability exposure works directly against the whole point behind the CC licenses: get people to license their stuff so that others can use it, in order to enrich the public domain.

The CC weblog has a good discussion about this topic. I definitely agree with Wendy's point about this being an option.

An appeal to Larry Lessig, Glenn Brown and the Creative Commons:

Please change this aspect of the Creative Commons licenses. As an author and a publisher of a music metadata database, I am not willing to incur this liability and I now have serious reservations about the CC licenses.

Posted by Mayhem at May 16, 2003 12:23 AM