Busy

I've been busy lately, and I'll be out of town this weekend, so blogging will be light. I mean, even lighter than usual. I decided to apply for a position that required me to prepare a second writing sample, so I've been working to excerpt a second piece on copyright that I wrote last spring. I've found quite a challenge in pulling together short writing samples, because the topics I've researched in the last year haven't lent themselves to brief yet thorough explanation. The excerpt I eventually pulled together covers cases that applied the four-factor fair use test in U.S. copyright law, and I may eventually use that as the basis of a post on that topic here.

I know, I say I'm going to post a lot and then I don't get around to it very quickly. I haven't dropped the Creative Commons licensing topic, though. I wrote and nearly completed a major revision of my earlier entry. It came out very long and looked too much, well, like a lawyer wrote it. So, I'm rewriting it again. I'm trying to find the balance between offering detailed explanations and boring people to death, trying to find the right level of abstraction.

Following up on my post the other day: I don't think the merger clause creates a parol evidence problem when an author specifies outside the license text what works the license will apply to. The parol evidence rule, at least in a majority of states, doesn't apply to contemporaneous writings. Adding a limitation to the license's scope outside the license text still seems to conflict with the express language of the merger clause, but there's nonetheless an ambiguity about the scope of the license that needs to be resolved, and a contemporary writing on that very topic offers good evidence for that purpose. [See what I mean -- you probably wouldn't want to read a long entry with lots of sentences like these in it.] The merger clause can't will away that ambiguity.

Denise Howell pointed out that someone could still contest a limitation of the scope of the license, and she's right. There's always a risk of disputes. It probably wouldn't even be an utterly frivolous argument for someone to make. The fact that someone will most likely lose a dispute in the end rarely precludes him or her from being a considerable pain in the meantime, especially since there's no guarantee that they'd lose.

I don't want to lose sight of the real world, though. Therein lies the challenge -- guessing at what about these licenses is going to turn out to be important for the people in the real world who use them. I could spend a lot of time writing about nuances that will never make a practical difference. With an experiment like this, it's hard to know what'll really turn out to be important in the end. I know the propagation clause is important, because it lies at the core of one of the goals of the entire licensing scheme and is one of the most dramatic features of the license, so you can bet I'm going to talk about that. It's more tricky to predict what sorts of things, if any, may lead to disputes. I'm still trying to decide how much detail to spend on the scope-of-license question.

I made some Creative Commons license propagation clause art, if anyone dares call it that. I wouldn't. I just did, of course, but I was kidding.

C.C. License and Work Propagation

Copying Anna's Work: Who has a legitimate copy and license?

You don't remember Jennifer and Dan from the hypothetical scenario in my first entry on the topic. Dan's new. He gets a license through the propagation clause. Jennifer's new too, and she's a rulebreaker. She didn't give Anna credit for her work. Bad Jen. No license for her.

Yes, I'm blogging too late. Here's hoping I don't regret it.