A weird case involving the usage of Creative Common License has threatened how the license is applied. Fortunately, judge at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York dismissed the case against FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc. on Friday, Feb. 24.
Judge dismissed the case that was filed filed by a non-profit organization known for its passionate work in educational field Great Minds. The organization filed complaint against Federal Express according to Ars Technica. for violating its copyright. Great Minds sued FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc. for copyright infringement and seeking royalty payments from the company.
The lawsuit against FedEx may potentially damage the entire Creative Commons License and their implementation. It is because since its founding, Creative Commons focuses its attempt to create legal platform for everyone to share their creative works.
Understanding the gravity of the case, Creative Commons requested permission from the judge presiding the case to deliver Amicus curiae, a third party brief on the case. Judge Denis R. Hurley granted the permission to Creative Commons, that work with legal counselors Andy Gass and Jonathan Ellis from Latham & Watkins in the case.
Along with its amicus brief, Creative Commons also filed a motion for leave to Judge Hurley. The motion asked the court to allow deviation of the case from copyright cases commonly handled. However, Judge Hurley dismissed the motion but later continued to dismiss the lawsuit.
Creative Commons is the organization founded in 2001 to provide a legal platform from creative works to be able to share and redistributed. Its founders, Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred are the proponents of open source software.
They see the needs to extend sharing culture in the open source community of developers to the wider application. So they founded the Creative Commons and developed the licensing scheme and infrastructure. As for now, there are billions of creative works are registered under the Creative Commons License.
Watch the explanation of the Creative Commons from the Wikimedia Foundation below:
