Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, August 22, 2008

US court upholds validity of open licenses

Lawrence Lessig, huge and important news: free licenses upheld, Lessig Blog, August 13, 2008.

... I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory ...

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license. ...

See also the blog post and press release by Creative Commons, the blog post by Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, or the BBC story.