16.5: Concluding Comments

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In conclusion it seems worth mentioning two features that most open licences lack: provision for notifying the copyright holder about how material is being used and provision for alternative dispute resolution.

Notification

It is surprising that open licences do not allow an author to require a user, in return for being free to use the author’s material, to keep the author informed about what a user does with the material. The African Medical Research Foundation’s licence requests this information but it is not a condition of using the material. Drafting such a condition, of course, would have to be done so as not to impose too much of a burden on users. But if it could be done the information would help assess the value of open licence material.

Alternative Dispute Resolution

We have seen the different opinions about what some of the clauses in the CC licences mean. And there has been litigation about the meaning of the GPL. As things stand only a court, possibly even a whole series of courts in different countries, can settle differences of opinion. Given the cost of litigation, it is unlikely that the courts will ever have an opportunity to do this. In 1999 ICANN adopted a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy for settling disputes about domain names. There is no reason why there should not be a similar dispute resolution procedure for settling disputes between copyright holders and users about the meaning of open licences.