Legal Tools Translation/4.0/German
Contents
Jurisdictions
Austria, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland
Language coordination
This effort will be coordinated between the CC teams in Luxemburg, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, as in all these German is an official language.
Translation Status
4.0: Final (read the announcement on the Creative Commons blog and on Netzpolitik).
CC0: In progress - final review (Step 7)
Key dates
4.0
First draft was submitted: 29 June 2016
Public comment period: - 12 July 2016
Translation officially published: 20 January 2017
CC0
First draft was submitted: 21 November 2016
Public comment period:
Translation officially published:
Translation team
- John Weitzmann
- Roland Alton-Scheidl
- Alexander Baratsits
- Simon Schlauri
We would like to thank the open content experts and commons activists involved: Annette Kaufmann, Armin Talke, Christoph Endell, Joachim Losehand, Klaus Graf, Leonhard Dobusch, Lukas Mezger, Magdalena Reiter, Matthias Schmid, Max von Grafenstein, Michela Vignoli, Nicole Lieger, Paul Klimpel, Till Jaeger, Till Kreutzer.
Translation process
4.0
The lawyers of CC DE and CC AT have had a translation sprint in Vienna on January 21-22, 2015. This has resulted in a unified first draft for CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 in German. It was handed over to Swiss lawyers for cross-checking. The public was notified of the comment period via the involved CC teams' websites, social media and other channels such as netzpolitik.org and several law blogs, the authors of which are part of the translation group's network.
The platform chosen for the commenting period is co-ment.com, an open source commenting solution for which hosting is offered. After the initial announcement of the commenting period, beginning of December 2015, the second round of announcements was sent directly to key people in the wider CC legal community via individual emails.
Key translation decisions and challenges
4.0
So far we encountered not many legally problematic bits. One of those is that in general, the legal meaning of "work" in Anglo-American law differs from that of "Werk" in German copyright law. Several words are challenging linguistically, in terms of policy. Especially the term for "Public License" is highly debated, with "Jedermannlizenz" as suggested in the First Draft not being widely accepted within the translation sprint group, mostly due to it being at odds with gender mainstreaming ideas.
A change to the published translation was made on 26 Aug 2020 to correct an error. The explanation from the translation team is as follows: The initial translation of English "if" into German "ob" was chosen as the closest one regarding the relatedness of the two words. However, this led to an uncertainty due to "if" having two quite distinct relational meanings: It can stand for both "in case" and "whether". What is meant here in the English text is "in case", while the German translation "ob" has the meaning of "whether". The alternative translation "falls" ("Fall" being the German noun for "case") brings the German text thus closer to the meaning of the English one. A post-translation consultation of IP lawyers in Germany was inconclusive regarding the question whether the initial translation containing "ob" would have any substantially different / detrimental effect in legal conflicts around compliance to CC licenses. It was discussed that a court having to decide on whether the license's conditions were adhered to, in a case where the content in question was not altered and no indication was made by the user (which could be seen as a breach of the condition to indicate "whether" a change was made, but not of a condition that requires indicating only "in case" a change was made) could interpret the ratio of the license to be satisfied with a non-existent indication being equivalent to a negative one. But it remains unsure, whether practical court cases would go this way. Be that as it may, the correction towards "falls" relieves users of a putative requirement to indicate the change status in every single case, even if no changes were made, one which the licenses actually do not intend. Therefore the correction is appropriate.
Draft translation files
4.0
