Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Update on Dutch CC case

Professor Bernt Hugenholtz has distributed a translation of the Dutch CC case, very useful for those of us who have never been to the Netherlands (unless you count transfers at Schiphol Airport). The relevant text reads:

“All four photos that were taken from www.flickr.com were made by Curry and posted by him on that website. In principle, Curry owns the copyright in the four photos, and the photos, by posting them on that website, are subject to the [Creative Commons] License. Therefore Audax should observe the conditions that control the use by third parties of the photos as stated in the License. The Court understands that Audax was misled by the notice ‘This photo is public’ (and therefore did not take note of the conditions of the License). However, it may be expected from a professional party like Audax that it conduct a thorough and precise examination before publishing in Weekend photos originating from the internet. Had it conducted such an investigation, Audax would have clicked on the symbol accompyinying the notice ‘some rights reserved’ and encountered the (short version of) the License. In case of doubt as to the applicability and the contents of the License, it should have requested authorization for publication from the copyright holder of the photos (Curry). Audax has failed to perform such a detailed investigation, and has assumed too easily thet publication of the photos was allowed. Audax has not observed the conditions stated in the License […]. The claim […] will therefore be allowed; defendants will be enjoined from publishing all photos that [Curry] has published on www.flickr.com, unless this occurs in accordance with the conditions of the License.”
The relevant part seems to be that the court held the browse-wrap element of the licence, as well as the "human readable code", the Commons deed that explains the terms and conditions of the licence is easy-to-read format.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Andrés,

I might be missing something very obvious, but is prof. Hugenholtz's translation available in its entirety somewhere, i.e. do you have a link to such translation?

Thanks,

Andrea

Andres Guadamuz said...

Dear Andres,

No, the translation arrived to me through a Creative Commons mailing list, and it is not a complete translation. The text can be found in Dutch here:

http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/zoeken/dtluitspraak.asp?searchtype=ljn&ljn=AV4204&u_ljn=AV4204