[Web4lib] Nature copyright clause (was Wikipedia vs. Britannica)

[Walt.Crawford at rlg.org]

If a license is enforceable as a contract (which not all licenses are), it
can do damn near anything.

But that has to be a license that you agree to before you see the work, not
simply a statement that appears on a site. If you click on "I agree" before
getting to the work, you're potentially in EULA land (End User License
Agreement)

You might be thinking of Creative Commons licenses, which are in a
different realm: They can indeed only grant you rights in addition to those
provided under copyright law. You don't click through a CC license to get
to material--and the whole point of CC is to modify standard copyright
provisions in a legal and clear manner. (Thus, for example, my weblog and
ejournal both operate under the most common CC license: You can reproduce
any part or all of them as often as you want with or without notification,
as long as (a) you credit the original and (b) you're not selling the
reproductions.)

But then, Mike, you're in the UK, so the laws may be different. They're
*certainly* different for fair use!

Walt Crawford
wcc at rlg.org, 650-691-2227
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Mike Taylor <mike at miketaylor.org.uk> wrote on 12/16/2005 08:11:28 AM:

> > Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:53:36 -0800
> > From: Walt.Crawford at rlg.org
> >
> > 2. If you were required to agree to a license--to click on a
> > EULA--to see the material, then it's no longer a copyright
> > issue. Whether such a license would be legally conscionable or
> > enforceable is quite another question, but you're dealing with
> > contract law, not copyright law.
>
> I had heard that such licences can only give you _more_ rights, not
> take away the rights that the law gives you by default.  Is that
> incorrect?  (I am about as far from being a lawyer as it's possible to
> be.)
>
>  _/|_
___________________________________________________________________
> /o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
> )_v__/\  "[The Common People] invented a ritual of Standing in Queue to
>     Pay Their Last Respects to the Body.  A national day of queuing
>     is, when you think about it, deeply, deeply English.  I venture
>     to say that many of the people in the queue also talked about
>     the weather" -- Andrew Rilstone on the Queen Mother's funeral.
>