The case concerned former MTV VJ and podcasting guru
Adam Curry, who published photos of his family on Flickr under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license.
Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a non-profit US corporation
based on the notion that some people may not want to exercise all
of the intellectual property rights the law affords them.
Its aim is to encourage creativity and innovation by paving a
middle ground between "All rights reserved" and anarchy. It
describes this as "Some rights reserved".
Inspired partly by the GNU General Public License developed by
the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has drafted licences
that give the public some rights to use and manipulate the work of
authors and artists, while allowing the authors to retain some
rights, such as those permitting commercial exploitation.
On this occasion the licence allowed material to be reproduced
for non-commercial purposes, so long as the reproduction gave
credit to the original author of the material.
However, Dutch tabloid Weekend reproduced four of the photos in
a story about Curry’s children, in breach of the licence, and Curry
sued for copyright and privacy infringement.
In its defence, Weekend argued that it was misled by a notice on
the website stating "this photo is public" (which is a standard
feature of all Flickr images that are viewable by the public), and
said that the link to the licence was not obvious. Weekend had
assumed that no authorisation from Curry was needed, it said.
Audax, the publisher of Weekend, argued that it was informed of
the existence of the licence only much later by its legal
counsel.
The Court rejected Weekend’s defence and, according to a
translation by the Creative Commons, held that the photos were
subject to the licence and that Audax should have followed its
conditions.
“It may be expected from a professional party like Audax that it
conduct a thorough and precise examination before publishing in
Weekend photos originating from the internet,” said the District
Court of Amsterdam.
The company faces a fine of €1,000 per photo if it publishes any
of Curry’s copyrighted pictures without permission again, Curry
said in his blog.
Paul Keller, Public Project Lead for Creative Commons in the
Netherlands welcomed the ruling.
“We are very happy with this decision as it demonstrates that
the millions of creators who use Creative Commons licences are
effectively protected against abuses of their willingness to
contribute to the commons,” he said.
Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons' CEO and Chairman, added,
“This decision confirms that the Creative Commons licensing system
is an effective way for content creators to manage their copyrights
online.”
“The decision should also serve as a timely reminder to those
seeking to use content online, to respect the terms that apply to
that content,” he said.
