Both in The Netherlands and in Spain the Creative Commons license was judged in court. In both cases the validity of this alternative copyright license was upheld.
In the Netherlands, the first court case about the validity of the Creative Commons license produced clear victory for the user of the license. On 9 March 2006 the district court of Amsterdam ruled in summary proceedings that the weekly gossip magazine 'Weekend' could not republish pictures that were published under a specific non-commercial CC license. The family pictures were made by Adam Curry, famous in internet circles for promoting podcasting. Curry had published the pictures on the pictures-website flickr.com under a so-called Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license, with the text 'this photo is public' and a reference to the appropriate CC license. Weekend did not seek or obtain prior permission.
Curry sued for both copyright and privacy infringement. Weekend defended itself by saying it did not understand the reference to the CC license. The magazine also claimed there could be no damages, since the pictures were freely available on the flickr website anyway.
The court ruled the copyright was unmistakable. Especially a professional party like the publisher of the magazine should conduct a thorough investigation before publishing pictures taken from the Internet. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, director of the Institute for Information Science of the University of Amsterdam and main creator of the Dutch CC license was very pleased with the ruling. He commented on the creative commons mailing-list: "The Dutch court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."
A few weeks earlier, on 17 February 2006 the Spanish court of Badajoz decided against SGAE, the Spanish music rights collecting society, in favor of a bar owner who played music released under a Creative Commons license. The court said none of the music played in disco bar Metropol between November 2002 and August 2005 was actually licensed by the collecting society. On the other hand, the CC licenses did allow for public performance of the work.
Full text of the Amsterdam district court decision (in Dutch only,
09.03.2006)
http://www.rechtspraak.nl/ljn.asp?ljn=AV4204
Mailinglist iCommons community discussion
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-icommons
Full text of the Badajoz court decision (in Spanish only, 17.02.2006)
http://www.internautas.org/archivos/sentencia_metropoli.pdf
Spanish Court Recognizes CC-Music (23.03.2006)
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830
(Contribution by Sjoera Nas, EDRI-member Bits of Freedom, the Netherlands)