It’s official: Free licenses like Creative Commons (CC) hold up in court. Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons has the (obviously biased, but good) background:
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. […] 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.
Neat. (Here’s the court’s full judgement.)
