[GOAL] Re: A case for strong fair use / fair dealing with restrictive licenses

[Graham Triggs]

On 28 April 2015 at 22:45, Heather Morrison <Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>
wrote:

>  There is nothing in any of the CC licenses that requires that works be
> made available free of charge, either by the downstream user or by the
> original licensor. It is true that a CC license cannot be revoked, however
> the catch is you have to have a copy of the work and proof of the license
> under which you obtained the work. There is nothing to stop the original
> licensor from changing their mind, taking down the CC-BY copy and replacing
> it with a work under whatever terms they like (or not making the work
> available at all).
>

In any licence that a work is distributed under, there is nothing
compelling the distributor to continue to distribute the work in perpetuity
under the same licence conditions.


>
>  This argument is basically that while CC-BY may appear to be highly
> desirable and reflect the BOAI definition of OA (which I now reject as the
> source of the problem), it is a weak license full of loopholes that could
> be the downfall of open access.
>

See my statement above. Licences attached to the distribution of a work
just deal with how people that receive the work can make use of it.

What the publisher / distributor can do has to be governed by the rights
assigned to them by the author / copyright holder, and/or the contract that
is in place between the author / copyright holder and the publisher /
distributor. Even when a journal publishes an article as CC-BY; even when
an author deposits a paper to a repository to be distributed as CC-BY, the
author is not making the work available to the publisher or repository
under a CC-BY licence. They are providing a limited set of rights and/or
signing a contract with specific instruction that the distribution to end
users must be made as CC-BY.

You are trying to attach a problem to a particular licence, that could
never, ever be prevented or solved by any licence that exists or could ever
be invented in the future.

Your concerns can only ever be addressed through the agreements an author
makes with a publisher, not through the licence that is offered to end
users.

The only "loophole" in CC-BY is whether you accept that downstream users
can make "commercial" use of the work - and if that is a genuine / serious
problem -NC and -SA variants can prevent that.

Regards,
G
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20150428/ef433f9a/attachment.html