allow commercial uses, and even whether to require attribution are each choices that the licensor may make essentially independently.[1]
The Creative Commons license documents are expressed in what the organization refers to as “legal code.”[2] At its most essential level, the “legal code” constitutes the license; it is the formal language expressing the grants of rights and the limiting conditions selected by the licensor.[3] To encourage widespread adoption and use of its licenses, however, Creative Commons also provides so-called “commons deeds”: accessible, plain-English summaries of the rights and limitations of each of the six standard licenses.[4] Finally, the organization offers each license as machine-readable metadata to aid indexing of the licensed work by search engines.[5]
The “legal code” of each Creative Commons license includes a “termination” (or forfeiture) clause of the same kind as the GPL.[6] Section 7(a) of the current version of each of the six standard licenses states, in part, that “[t]his License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License,” subject to specified exceptions.[7] Absent default by the licensee, however, Creative Commons licenses are expressly declared to be perpetual and, indeed, not capable of withdrawal by the licensor:
Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distribut- ing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such elec- tion will not serve to withdraw this License . . . and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.[8]
- ↑ See R. Polk Wagner, Information Wants to be Free: Intellectual Property and the Mythologies of Control, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 995, 1032–33 (2003) (arguing that Creative Commons licenses are effective in effectuating licensors’ specific intent precisely because they emerge against a background of strong proprietary rights for the licensor).
- ↑ The influence of law professor Lawrence Lessig, a co-founder of Creative Commons and the progenitor of the “code is law” meme, is readily apparent in the choice of the label “legal code.” See Lessig, supra note 49, at 1–8.
- ↑ For example, the “legal code” for the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-3.0-United States license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode (last visited Mar. 4, 2010) [hereinafter CC BY-SA-3.0-US Legal Code]. See also Śeverine Dusollier, The Master’s Tools v. The Master’s House: Creative Commons v. Copyright, 29 Colum. J.L. & Arts 271, 276 (2006) (“The Legal Code is a lengthy contract with numerous detailed provisions . . . that can be legally enforced”).
- ↑ See Schaeffer, supra note 130, at 385.
- ↑ See id.
- ↑ See supra notes 72–73 and accompanying text.
- ↑ CC BY-SA-3.0-US Legal Code, supra note 135, § 7(a). Identical language appears in the same location in the “legal code” for each of the six standard licenses.
- ↑ Id. § 7(b); cf. supra note 72 and accompanying text.
