[Harmony-Drafting] introduction

Catharina Maracke catharinamaracke at googlemail.com
Tue Oct 16 02:51:09 UTC 2012


Dear Allison,

Many thanks for the kind introduction!

Nice to meet you all, I look forward to getting more actively involved. The question of internationalization and porting is a very important aspect for the future of the Harmony project, I think. Let me share some thoughts and experiences from my time at Creative Commons, where I was in charge of the international porting project for a couple of years. And perhaps Andrew wants to weigh in, given his background as founder of Creative Commons South Africa and having served as the CC SA legal project lead for many many years. 

"Porting" according to Creative Commons terminology requires both, linguistic translation and legal adoption to the respective national copyright law. In order to qualify as an official national version of the CC licenses and to be labeled with the CC name and logo, Creative Commons has to approve the final version of the national licenses and upload them on their website/license chooser. Such an official national version of the CC licenses is the result of a formal collaboration between CC and a local partner. To initiate a collaboration with CC and start a license porting project as one of the "official international CC affiliates" under the official CC umbrella/ brand, the local partner has to sign an agreement with CC covering all sorts of questions around the structure of the porting process itself, trademark questions, etc. 

The important point is that the process of porting CC licenses to the various national copyright regimes requires an official cooperation between CC and the national partner to guarantee specific standardized guidelines to facilitate the porting process. Only when collaborating with CC according to these inherent steps, CC will recognize the partner project as an official affiliate and approve the national version of CC licenses as official national CC licenses. The whole process was set up to address questions around quality management and branding. 

In addition to the initial process of working on officially approved national CC licenses, there is the question of how to handle the versioning process of the CC licenses itself. E.g. if you look at the overview of national CC chapters you will find that some of them are still working with version 2.0 or 2.5. 

All these questions will come up when talking about "porting" the Harmony agreements to the Dutch or French copyright system. I am sure questions around quality management and how to deal with agreements that are based on a Harmony agreement, but qualify as a modified version (be it because of legal changes to reflect one specific jurisdiction or to reflect one specific project's needs) have been brought up during the launch of the agreements and I don't want to replicate what has been said before. But I think that -at this point of the discussion- it would be sensitive to not have people working on various agreements which are called Harmony agreements without any consensus on what exactly would qualify as a Harmony agreement. Until there is a clear understanding of the need for a porting project, possible resources and especially the structure for this effort, these modified agreements can be marked as an agreement "based on the Harmony templates" or something similar? 

The overall question to be discussed is whether Harmony should follow the "multiple jurisdiction" approach (Creative Commons) or the "one global license" approach. I can see many good reasons for the porting idea, including legal certainty and adoption (spreading the word) in various countries. But I can also see good arguments for the one global license approach, e.g. simplification, and avoiding an array of private international law issues. Before we explore the possibilities of an official "porting" project for the Harmony agreements, I am curious to identify details why exactly different national versions are necessary for various jurisdictions and whether these details are important enough to seriously think about setting up some kind of porting structure. In terms of the two jurisdictions mentioned on this list, Netherlands and France, what exactly are the crucial parts? Scope of the license grant? Waiver of Moral rights? Signature formalities? Liability questions? And how does it work with the choice of law clause? Maybe those potential issues can also be addressed in a future version 2.0 of the Harmony agreements, which could include an even more internationalized legal language?

In other words, what exactly is the key problem with the current Harmony agreements that makes a Dutch or French version necessary?
 
Thanks,

Catharina

On 16.10.2012, at 11:06, Allison Randal wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to introduce Catharina Maracke and Andrew Rens. They have a
> background in Creative Commons, and are interested in the next steps for
> Harmony, particularly around internationalization.
> 
> Catharina and Andrew, welcome to Harmony drafting.
> 
> Allison



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