Creative Commons license upheld in court

I use a Creative Commons license on this blog and often mention them to others. I believe that it is best to state your intentions, either by using a copyright statement or by using a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday in the Creative Commons blog, Mia Garlick writes:

Many people have asked us over the years whether any court had held that CC licenses were enforceable. I have always found this question to be amusing. In my many years as a lawyer in private practice, if the licenses I had drafted were *not* litigated, then I was considered to have done my job well. But for some, it seems that keeping people out of court is not an indication of CC's success; the legitimacy of the CC licensing system depended on some judicial validation.

So now we have that to some extent. The first known court decision involving a Creative Commons license was handed down on March 9, 2006 by the District Court of Amsterdam. The case confirmed that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it.

Good news! You can read her entire post here.

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