Wishing to promote scientific or educational literature, researchers, academics and teachers are exploiting the publication and diffusion possibilities of the internet. The underlying principle is to share knowledge and research outcomes with the entire scientific and educational community.

The movement of free access to knowledge has its foundations in initiatives of the American university environment. The principles of this “school” were in fact born together with the concepts of “Copyleft” and “Open source” originating in the world of software.

This approach is based on the notion of common good (commons). In this specific case, we are talking about the federation of communities of teachers or researchers around the creation of a common online resource to which everyone can add their contribution but not subtract one.

In order to protect freely accessible publications, the ROMEO project (Rights Metadata for Open Archiving) coordinated by the English university of Loughborough, recommends the use of a Creative Commons license. Although this does not follow the only license model available, because of its success and economy it possesses the predominant legal characteristics of the English-speaking world from which the movement of free access to knowledge stems. For French, Belgian, Italian, Spanish or German teachers such licenses create real legal problems of coexistence with national rules governing authorship.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses allow the public to make use of the material according to the conditions expressed by the author. These licences stem from the project "Creative Commons" initiated in 2001 at the “Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society” and are inspired by the so-called free software model and namely by the famous GNU GPL (General Public Licence).

Unfortunately, the generic wording of the Creative Commons license clauses does not respect French copyright rules that require the modalities for the concession of rights (identification of the two parties, description of the work and yielded rights: reproduction, translation etc) to be contractually defined.

Consequently, considering the legal nullity of the CC licenses, the cybernauts using free content under them have no assurance that the author using the licence will not exploit the voids of the contract to sue the user for plagiarism. This could in principle happen, if the author was to step back on the decision to share the work and randomly intercepted a cybernaut using the work in question.

If, on the contrary, the author respects the clauses of the CC license, even if they are not legally valid, (s)he renounces all the rights on the work created. The CC licence creates a sort of "contractual public domain" which applies as long as the work is under the licence. The author totally loses control of the process as (s)he has no track of the users downloading the material.

In contrast to what the slogan of the Creative Commons project asserts “Share what you want, keep what you want", the Creative Commons licenses should be presented to the author as a renunciation of all authorship rights.

In the countries where copyright is the only valid model, such conclusions can among teachers and researchers create fear of losing the fruit of their work or of being legally pursued. Nevertheless, in the interest of knowledge the well-founded concept of common good should not be questioned. However, there is a need for better protection of both authors and users.

Philippe Amblard, Ecole Normale Supérieure, CONFIANCE project