I just read an old thread about whether a copyright holder can drag back rights they have already released. It reminded me of a case I read about, back in 2000. Rather than post this to an old thread I am starting a new thread. I started an article about the
Mattel Cyber Patrol program, too.
Stephen has it exactly right. The license is between the owner and the person who is receiving the work. Each distribution of the work is a separate contract. I could give a picture to Hayford under CC-by-nc, then the next day sell the same photo to Joe for £10 on a closed license then the day after give Stephen the image using CC-by-sa in the morning and then charge A. Stos £150 for the image with resale rights in the afternoon. The license I give to one person does not affect the rights on the license of the other people I distributed to.
Of couse, why would A. Stos pay £150 for an image that he could have obtained form Stephen for free? Well knowledge of the alternative license is one key factor. This is actually done quite often. People frequently release various qualities or resolutions of images under different licenses, usually with different price tags.
There is one problem that arises. Authors license their work to CZ and CZ then re-distributes the work under the same license. So CZ is a single entity, you can give CZ a more liberal license but not a more restrictive one. At least not without permission. If CZ agrees to abandon it's rights to the more free license and accept the more restrictive then you can change the license. If both parties to the license agree then you can change anything. (of course, why would CZ agree to a move to a more restrictive license other than out of good will.)
Well,
check out this story.
Two computer science students decided to see if they could figure out what was happening under the hood of a program designed to help parents protect their children from dangerous internet sites.
In 2000 Mattel Toys was marketing a program with a blacklist, called
"Cyber Patrol". It used a blacklist. The local copy of the blacklist was encrypted -- insecurely. The developer of the Mattel program had used
"security through obscurity" -- generally a bad idea. The students wrote a program that decrypted the blacklist. They published the source code to their program under a free liscence when they published an academic paper about their work.
Mattel sued them. If I recall correctly US law, at the time, made decrypting black-lists a crime. The two grad students were not Americans, and didn't live in the USA. So, in theory, US law should not have been much of a concern for them. But, if I recall correctly, the personal expense of defending themselves against Mattel's lawsuits got the authors to sign over all rights to their work, in return for Mattel dropping their lawsuit.
Mattel threatened to sue any site that mirrored the pair's program and paper. Many sites caved. But, some sites didn't, because their copy dated to prior to the authors signing over their rights to Mattel.
As I drafted this reply I drafted an article about the
Mattel Cyber Patrol program.
For the record I have no ego attachment to this version of the article. I acknowledge I am not an expert on the law on Digital Rights, or on Computer Science. I do not regard this as an "excellent" article. I won't claim it is even a good article. I'd like to believe others will agree that it is an adequate interim article, and that the Citizendium is very slightly improved by having an adequate interim article on this topic, rather than no coverage at all.
I mention this because I have gotten some feedback from another contributor who has some general criticism of all my contributions, and has advised me they welcome me to only start excellent articles.
