Creative Commons license upheld

Via TidBITS, this report that a Dutch Court has upheld the validity of a Creative Commons license which allowed only non-commercial use. The case involved well-known podcaster Adam Curry and a tabloid magazine that used photos from his Flickr site.

While not binding on other jurisdictions, the Dutch ruling, which enforces the plain meaning of the license, lengthens the odds against anyone trying to challenge CC licenses.

2 thoughts on “Creative Commons license upheld

  1. My question is why would someone choose the Creative Common Licence

    Atribution, NON-COMMERCIAL

    Over

    Atribution

    Over

    Attribution, ShareAlike

    This debate is closely related to the philosophical differences between the GNU GPL (Attribition, shareAlike, e.g., GNU/Linux) licence and the BSD licences (Attribition, e.g., FreeBSD/Darwin [the code that runs your osx machine]) and the various “free for non-commercial use� [e.g., few low profile programs].

    On a personal, ethical, level I find the BSD licence satisfactory. I think that GPL, is overly restrictive, and I simply don’t get non-commercial. It seems motivated by a naïve badly thought out reasoning, unless, of course, one envisages selling their creations to commercial entities.

  2. I posted on this a while back. I think “Attribution, Non-Commercial” is a good default, since it means commercial users have to make a specific agreement. Curry’s case, where his family photos were used by a tabloid is a pretty good illustration of why you might want to restrict commercial use.

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