[cc-community] ASCAP VS CREATIVE COMMONS

Peter Brink peter.brink at brinkdata.se
Sat Jan 6 08:16:57 EST 2007


drew Roberts skrev:
> On Friday 05 January 2007 03:53 pm, Terry Hancock wrote:
>> drew Roberts wrote:
>>> On Friday 22 December 2006 07:44 pm, Bjorn Wijers wrote:
>>> You use the plural here. Is there only one collection society there or is
>>> there more than one?
>> The answer appears to be that there is one per jurisdiction (e.g. one
>> per country). 
> 
> Fine, I am seeking knowledge here. Now would it be illegal in these countries 
> for another collection society geared to the needs of Free Works and other CC 
> licensed works to set up and operate?
> 

As the Swedish copyright act puts it "[o]nly an organisation 
representing a substantial number of Swedish authors in the field 
concerned is entitled to claim the remuneration", so such an collecting 
society would need a large number of Swedish members to be able to 
operate (in Sweden).

The collecting societies inability and/or down right refusal, to deal 
with open source and open content licenses is probably something that is 
best solved by legislation. Or possibly by taking the matter to court.

The European Commission has published a paper, COM(2004) 261 final, 
called "The Management of Copyright and Related Rights in the Internal 
Market" (which can be found at: 
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/2004/com2004_0261en01.pdf), 
which contains a summary of how the member nations of the EU has dealt 
with collecting societies and what needs to be done, in the opinion of 
the commission, to improve the way such collecting societies work.

The commission seems to come the conclusion that legislation is needed 
to harness the de facto monopoly that collecting societies have. The 
commission has invited a large number of parties to comment the paper 
(see: 
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/management/management_en.htm#contribution),
the only open source/open content organisation who has commented the 
paper is FSF France. Their comment is available on-line, together with 
99 others 
(http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/management/contributions_en.htm).

It would valuable I think if CC (or iCommons) also provided it's 
opinion. As an organisation, providing services used by many European 
creators and users, CC does represent an ever growing movement, the 
voice of which would ought to make it self heard in these circumstances.

/Peter Brink


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