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Re: CC-BY : "clarification letter" ?



On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 05:26:51PM -0500, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> > > (2) the license does not interfere with fair-use rights 
> > > (e.g. quoting you on a bibliography)
> > 
> > Is this trying to reverse the author name purge condition? I'm not
> > sure that appealing to fair use covers it.
> 
> Not the whole thing. The problem lies with the mis-use of the purge 
> clause. The purge clause is good, for example, if you modify my work to 
> the point where it says the opposite of what I intended, I wouldn't want 
> to be in the list of authors.

No, this is a classic case of trying to prohibit in a copyright
license something which is ALREADY prohibited by law and fouling stuff
up in the process. Do not attempt to reimplement author's rights in
licenses; it does not work, and when you get it wrong (as in this
license) it causes trouble.

It is not permitted, under copyright law (in every jurisdiction I'm
aware of that implements Berne-style copyright), to misrepresent a
work so as to claim it is not the work of its actual author, or to
claim that it is the work of a person who is not the actual
author. These prohibitions cannot be waived in a copyright license or
otherwise traded.

This is obviously necessary because otherwise I could just write a
*new* work that says the opposite of what you intended and put you in
the list of authors, and since it's not based on your actual work your
license is irrelevant. So doing that sort of thing in the license
won't help, and it's not legal in the first place so the whole affair
is pointless.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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