Commons-Talk

The term “license” provides a minor confusion in the Philippines when one talks about Creative Commons licenses, in light of the attached meaning of “license” in ordinary legal dealings.

CC License != permit

When one talks about licenses in the Philippines, the first thing that comes to mind would be government permits. Since one needs a license to pursue a regulated profession, a license to pursue business, a license to drive on Philippine roads, and so on; one has to go to the government to procure a license before one can pursue a particular regulated task. In case the government is not involved in the dispensation of certain licenses, the power of a certain non-governmental organizations is sometimes recognized to provide for the same. Particularly significant, for example, is the license necessary to mark certain food packages to be Halal compliant, as provided by the Office on Muslim Affairs.

It is not unusual thus to be confronted with a question, about Creative Commons licenses, made in the following fashion: “Where do I register so that I can use Creative Commons licenses?”

CC License = Your permission

The licenses of Creative Commons are more in the nature of written permissions, rather than in the nature of formal permits. No one is required to register with Creative Commons to use Creative Commons licenses (including their visual buttons and links) to mark shared works. Creative Commons licenses are provided by Creative Commons — as standardized permission documents which are human, lawyer, and machine-readable — to enable people who are willing to share their works to the community towards the “Some Rights Reserved” direction (as against locking them under “All Rights Reserved,” and short of fully dedicating them into the public domain).¹

Significantly, thus, the distinction lies in the central actor in permits and permissions. Empowerment cascades in permissions.

CC PH license = contract between licensor and licensee

The Philippine-ported Creative Commons licenses are treated as contracts² unlike in the unported license, which admits that its applicability relies on “To the extent this license may be considered to be a contract.” The reason for the exclusion of this clause in the Creative Commons Philippine-ported license was the fact that the Philippines follows civil law rather than common law. Supreme Court decisions do not extend the law but merely form part of the legal system of the Philippines³ Further, there are only five sources of obligations in the Philippines: law, contract, quasi-contract, delict and quasi-delict. The obligations of the licensee, in complying with the license, cannot attach unless the document is deemed to be a contract.

1. The Creative Commons website provides, in part, that “Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from ‘All Rights Reserved’ to ‘Some Rights Reserved.’ We’re a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.” [↩]
2. Subsection “The Creative Commons Philippine-ported licenses” in Why use Creative Commons Philippine licenses? [↩]
3. Article 8, Republic Act 386 (Civil Code of the Philippines) provides that “Judicial decisions applying or interpreting the laws or the Constitution shall form a part of the legal system of the Philippines.” [↩]

March 17th, 2008 | Category: Creative Commons | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL