Legal questions in Creative Commons

Now we get to the nitty gritty of the conference, where some of the important legal questions are being discussed. The first question is that of moral rights. A very lively discussion has taken place regarding moral rights. There was an interesting proposal to add the right to integrity as a new element called the Integrity Element (IN), in addition to the main four elements. This has prompted some comments, particularly dealing with compatibility of international licences and the problem of implementing the integrity right to countries that do not allow the waiver of moral rights. The issue was not resolved, but there was a proposal to differentiate the moral rights issues with endorsement issues. That means that there could be an addition to the attribution element to include a line that states that the use of the work is not considered an endorsement towards the user.

The other legal discussion has been the issue of collection societies. Some collective societies have already placed restrictions to the their subscribers not to use CC, as is the case with Australia. The other problem is the collecting societies using FUD to attack CC because they see it as a threat to their monopolistic model. One of the discussions was precisely that creative societies are monopolistic, therefore anti-competitive, and could be attacked in those lines. The bottom line has to be that any move to solve this problem has to come from the artists that make up these societies.

This has been a very worthwhile event so far.