It is a common place to recognise that we live in a moment where everything has to be measured and quantified, which leads to insane and toxic worlds. Since the advent of the publication of the Likes, quantity replaced quality, magnifying stupidity around the world. The web was no longer a nice place when the invasion of AI slop further deteriorated it at a never seen scale. The frequent activity of searching for any information is now a tedious signal/noise work, full with results of websites that do not get into the point but only beat around the bush. The only thing that matters is to capture attention and sell its implicit data. This is not new, Herbert A. Simon asserted in the 60’s that in a world with excess of information, the most important value is the attention, a scarce resource. The attention economy it is called.
This year I have been honoured with two awards. I had not received one since I was in school, when a numerous group of students received a bunch of awards for several reasons: the best sportsman/woman, the best ethical values, the best grades… In the end, lots of us received a diploma. But this time it has been different.
As a Free Software user since more than 25 years ago (Debian potato) I have been involved in a good amount of initiatives related to the right to access knowledge. To mention some, the Spanish Wikipedia fork, a tour de force against a for-profit Wikipedia, held until Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated; the first judicial ruling in the world ever mentioning the term Copyleft, the consideration of the hyperlinks as a pointer of information and not as copyright public communication, until the European Court of Justice sank under the industry interests; the defence of Spanish public Universities against collective agencies claims; collaborating with the Creative Commons licences adaptation to Spanish jurisdiction; my PhD dissertation about citizen open practices and, now, the Bosco case, where I claimed the right to access the source code of an application coded by a public administration, app that decides our rights. I lost Bosco case in first instance, I lost it again in the court of appeals. And I won it in the Supreme Court. Since then, my client the Civio Foundation, mentions it as one of its main achievements. Yes, what a fantastic case.
Back to the awards. As mentioned above, this year I received two prizes. The first one came from Globoversia, a group of jurists who recognised the value of the Bosco ruling as the most important legal achievement in Spain in 2025 and had the perceptivity to stress that “behind sound case law there are often lawyers who, through creativity, tenacity and procedural skill, are able to persuade the courts with their arguments”. The second award came from the Spanish chapter of the Red Académica de Gobierno Abierto, a group of scholars devoted to freedom of access to public information. In this case, the award came due to a lifespan defending the right to access to public information.
When I received the awards my gratitude words on both events were similar. I was honoured to receive the public recognition, but we should not forget all other people who, with no visibility at all, support the structural ideas of what we deem valuable. We live in a society where we only value visibility, while the invisible people are the essential core of what underpins our daily life.
Thus, I thought, as in the early Twitter and its #FollowFriday hashtag, why not remember and write about one situation that is unknown to the public and is really very valuable?
So, here it goes: it is about Javier Candeira and an unknown issue that happened with the Creative Commons Spanish licences.
Javier is now an old friend, but in 2004 he was barely a name, an email address and a nickname: he went by “candyman” on barrapunto.com, the now-defunct Slashdot clone launched by a team of computer science academics. And it was in his capacity as Free Software agitator that he participated in the Creative Commons mailing list where the tailoring of the licences to Spanish jurisdiction was debated. “Javier from barrapunto” was one of the most opinionated of the non-lawyers on the list, always ready with his strong opinions, weakly held. His arguments were forceful but principled, and he would often be ready with a “you’re right!”, even more pleased to have learnt something new than he would have been by having “won the argument”.
One day Javier reached out to me privately. There was a problem with the 2.0 text of the licenses, already published and in use by thousands of Creative Commons fans, that needed correcting, but it also needed discretion. The “lawyers of the list” (Candeira’s words) had managed to make all Creative Commons Spain 2.0 licenses share-alike, independently of the licensors’ intentions and actions when selecting the available options on the creativecommons.org interface. In his email, Javier asked me to please double check his reading of the situation, and to handle it “as a lawyer”, because he feared that he would be talked down by the lawyers of the list… and also to handle it off-list, to spare Creative Commons the PR hit.
Here’s an excerpt from the email where, among other corrections to Spanish legal terminology in the licenses, I took Javier’s explanation and made it “palatable to lawyers”. Sorry not to translate the Spanish wording, but I want to be as exact as possible.
**8.a & 8.b
Present wording:
a. Cada vez que usted explote de alguna forma la obra, o una obra
conjunta o una base de datos que la incorpora, deberá ceder los
derechos de explotación mediante una licencia sobre la obra
original en las mismas condiciones y términos que la licencia
concedida a usted.
b. Cada vez que usted explote de alguna forma una obra derivada,
deberá ceder los derechos de explotación mediante una licencia
sobre la obra por usted creada en las mismas condiciones y términos
que la licencia concedida a usted.
[[[Javier Candeira said (and I agreed):
This is a misunderstanding of the terms of the CC 8.a and 8.b. The
Spanish version is a mere restatement of the terms of the
Share-Alike element of the license as stated already in 4.a and
4.b.
This is what the current phrasing of Spanish (and maybe Catalan,
but I don't speak Catalan) 8.a and 8.b says:
8. Miscellaneous
a. Each time You distribute or publically digitally perform the
Work or a Collective Work, You must offer the recipient a license
to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted
to You under the license.
8.b Each time You distribute or publically digitally perform a
Derivative Work, You must offer the recipient a license to the
Derivative Work on the same terms and conditions as the license
granted to You under the license.
In the General CC the party offering the license is the original
Licensor of the original Work, and not the Licensee who is reading
the license. This applies to both 8.a and 8.b. The other change
added in 8.b is that the work this provision applies to is the
Derivative Work, while in the General CC the Work being
sub-licensed is the Original Work.
I can only interpret what Lessig et al meant by the license, but
according to my understanding, 8.a and 8.b are corollaries of
ShareAlike, and not a rewording of it as stated in the present Spanish
translation dated as of 2004.10.11th.
This is the corollary: if I offer a Work under a ShareAlike CC
license, I am also offering my Work under the same license to any
citizen who receives it, or a Collective or Derivative Work based
upon it, from a third party, *even if this third party does not
make that license available to the hypotetical citizen in this
example*.
(It should be clear, really, since both "Licensor" and "Work" were
defined in point 1, that the "Licensor" mentioned in point 8 should
be the same person who offers this license, not the one reading it
and applying it a posteriori. Also, since "Derivative Work" was
clearly defined, one would wonder why change "Original Work" to
"Derivative Work" in 8.b without bothering to tell Creative Commons
they made a mistake in their General CC.)
]]]
The Spanish CC points 8.a and 8.b should then read:
8. Miscelánea
a. Cada vez que usted explote de alguna forma la obra, o una obra
conjunta o una base de datos que la incorpore, el licenciador
original ofrece a los terceros y sucesivos licenciatarios la cesión de
derechos sobre la obra en las mismas condiciones y términos que los
de la licencia concedida a usted.
b. Cada vez que usted explote de alguna forma una obra derivada, el
licenciador original ofrece a los terceros y sucesivos licenciatarios
la cesión de derechos sobre la obra original en las mismas
condiciones y términos que los de la licencia concedida a usted.
[[[The "original" in "licenciador original" shouldn't really be
needed, since it is defined in point 1, but I am adding it here
since some confusion has already been proved possible.]]]
It’s irrelevant whether this mistake was due to misunderstanding of common practices in Free Software licensing, by an oversight, or by some of the lawyers having poor English. I know we all missed this error. I missed it too until it was pointed out to me by Javier Candeira. This was a serious misstep, and it was Javier who identified it, communicated it discretely, and then stood back to let other people fix it without making too much noise.
Enough time has passed that the story can be told: Javier Candeira identified a serious structural error in the Creative Commons Spain licenses, made sure it got resolved, and received no public credit for it… until now. The record is now corrected. The invisible has now been made visible.
The 25^th^ of January of 2005, Javier curated two events in Madrid celebrating the 100 days of the publication of the final text of the licences in Spanish. The morning event was at the Residencia de Estudiantes, once the home of García Lorca, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. It was an invitation-only gala for the press and the members of the Creative Commons Spain porting effort, where the speakers were early users of the licenses. The afternoon event was a presentation to the public at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Here the guest of honour was Cory Doctorow, and Javier performed an impressive simultaneous interpretation of Cory’s speech before moderating a panel with audience participation.
The events were a standing-room-only success. The licences, you all know.
