http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060316052623594

The significant piece is this: the Creative Commons licenses are quite new, so there has been very little in the way of case law so far, so this is a significant development, as you will see. You can read successful plaintiff Adam Curry's blog on the ruling too. He adds this important piece: that while his claim for damages for past use was denied, going forward, if the pictures are used again, the defendant "will be fined 1000 euros (about $1200) for each photo they use without permission."

The ruling rejected a "the license wasn't clear" defense, particularly for sophisticated entities, and it upheld the license as binding without the licensee having to agree or even to have knowledge of the terms of the license. I'm sure you can extrapolate from the ruling:
In case of doubt as to the applicability and the contents of the License, it [defendant] should have requested authorization for publication from the copyright holder of the photos (Curry). Audax has failed to perform such a detailed investigation, and has assumed too easily thet publication of the photos was allowed. Audax has not observed the conditions stated in the License […]. The claim […] will therefore be allowed; defendants will be enjoined from publishing all photos that [Curry] has published on www.flickr.com, unless this occurs in accordance with the conditions of the License.”

I gather Audax is commercial, and Curry's license for the photos is Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike, so I don't see how Audax can ever use the photos in accordance with this license.



Adam Curry redeams himself for his earlier missteps in my opinion.