Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist

[Aymeric Mansoux <am-nt@kuri.mu>]

Rob Myers said :

> On 17/11/11 01:24, Heiko Recktenwald wrote:
> > I would make a difference between the relation between creator A and
> > user B and the relation between user B and C.
> >
> > Even if creator A would OWE something to user B, he would owe nothing
> > to user C.
> 
> B owes something to C, though, and B got it from A. A cannot change B's
> ability to give A's work to C. What A "owes" C depends on how
> Romantically we view A's work. But C will certainly end up with A's work.
 <...>

Just to add to what Rob and the others have already said, I think there
is also a confusion between copyright, moral rights and the
effectiveness of the latter within copyleft practices. In theory A can
still stop C to keep on making a particular usage of A's work if there
is a way to demonstrate that this particular usage, even though
fully respecting the terms of the license, is damaging for A's honor and
reputation.

That's the simplified general idea. In practice every juridiction has
its own way to define moral rights and by extension its own cases of
what is considered "damaging". To make things worse the very concept of
moral rights does not exist in all juridictions. Overall, whether it is
defined or not, the whole idea is difficult to put in practice, if not
hard to make relevant to a specific context.

In the end, this only concerns very specific situations that will only
change the nature and possibly terminate the license or the contract
between A and C. B's rights will remain unchanged, as well as the ones
from D, E, F, ..., Z because free culture licenses are irrevocable. The
GPLv3 and CC licenses are very explicit in that regard. A good
illustration of the difficulty to deal with moral right issues is by
checking all the mechanisms in CC licenses to make sure A is not wrongly
credited for changes that were not endorsed.

So, as stated previously, once the decision is made, is public and that
the licensed work has been already copied/distributed, there is no
turning back.

a.
--
http://su.kuri.mu


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