Israeli court also confirmed the legality of the license Creative Commons and condemned its violators

Lawsuits regarding CC licenses occur infrequently, although we exist for almost ten years and hundreds of millions of creative works are published under CC licenses. CC believes that this lack of litigation is evidence of the wide recognition and clarity of our licenses . However, we still appreciate occasional court decisions confirming that CC licenses function as they are intended to function ( note that there are several on our wiki ), such as recent decisions in Belgium and Israel. These solutions also demonstrate the important features of our licenses and how they work to help copyright owners share works, while fully retaining all the rights that they have not chosen to transfer.

About the Belgian case, I already wrote .

This month, an Israeli court for the first time provided assistance in a lawsuit for copyright infringement filed by the licensor of Creative Commons. In Avi Re'uveni v. Mapa inc. The plaintiffs uploaded photos on Flickr and licensed them under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. The defendant violated all three license conditions when she made a collage that included photographs, sold collages and did not indicate authorship. The defendant claimed that she did not know that the photos were protected by copyright or that they were distributed under CC licenses, claiming that she downloaded them from another site where there was no copyright information or CC license.
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The judge concluded that the defendant does not have the right to use copyrighted photographs and, therefore, is liable for the violation. Although the judge noted the CC licenses only in passing and did not discuss enforceability or that their conditions were violated, he did not assume that the license was illegal or that the defendant was not responsible for copyright infringement for distributing Creative Commons photographs. For further analysis, CC Israel made a statement on the court case.

These cases together highlight some important fundamental facts about how CC licenses work. First of all, our licenses work in conjunction with copyright, and not instead of copyright . This means that if the terms of the CC license that you applied to your music or other creative work are violated as the judge concluded in the Belgian case, the result is a copyright infringement and no less. Conversely, downloaded users who comply with the license terms are not guilty of violation. Both court decisions also support a coherent and subtle (but important) position for CC licensors - using a CC license does not work against you when it comes to securing your copyright later, even if the users of your work may not be aware of your choice of license . Ultimately, there is no penalty for the line of choice of flexibility beyond “all rights reserved” when it comes to securing your copyright.


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