So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
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, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.
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.
Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.
The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.
When we talk to organizations that want to use Creative Commons
licenses, we inevitably end up in the legal department. In many cases,
these legal departments are, understandably, conservative and they
throw a lot of reasons why "it can't work" into the discussion. They
often create an impenetrable wall of legal mumbo jumbo that often
causes the management or the teams inside of these organizations to
give up trying to use Creative Commons licenses.
This notion of whether CC licenses are just contracts which require
things like click-wrapped acknowledgment from the user or not hinge on
this distinction that has been made clear with this ruling. Clarity on
this point should make it significantly easier to clear conservative
legal departments and will hopefully make adoption that much easier.