I was at Yale on Wednesday giving my “Treaties’ Domains†paper at Oona Hathaway’s international law seminar. But later on I dropped by the Yale Information Society Project and had a chat about an interesting idea.
Eddan Katz was talking about a paper by Tony Reese about the reverter interest in copyright and its effect on creative commons licenses. This made me wonder – is there more of a place for a creative commons license that includes a reverter? For all I know this may be a well-discussed issue among creative commons people, but I’m curious.
Right now CC licenses are irrevocable. As the site says, “Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license.”
But might this be sometimes usefully different? For example, say I license my photographs subject to a reverting creative commons license. Most of my photos I am perfectly happy with everyone using as they like. But maybe I just so happened to take a photo of Yochai Benkler that becomes famous and worth millions. In that case I might want to revert that license, and, in the future, start licensing the photo for a fee.
There’s a few problems with the proposal. First no one would want to use a CC work that could later be revoked, to the tune of possibile liability. It’s almost like a trap. Second, the structure of the CC contract makes it hard to see how your work, already out there, might be restricted from further usage. But if you somehow wrote a license that grandfathered specific uses before revocation, but stopped others, that might be something.
Another option is a license that came with an expiration date – this is free to use until 2010, say.
The attraction is that such licenses might encourage more people to put their potentially valuable work under open licenses, at least for a while, to test the waters, and see what gets popular. On the other hand, the idea might be bad, and create even more copyright confusion.
