[cc-community] Copyright enforcement and CC BY-NC licenses

Kevin Phillips (home) tacet at qmpublishing.com
Sat Aug 2 03:33:54 EDT 2008


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jonathon" <jonathon.blake at gmail.com>
To: <cc-community at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 5:20 AM
Subject: Re: [cc-community] Copyright enforcement and CC BY-NC licenses


> On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 20:07, drew Roberts  wrote:
>
>
>> They can't be paid royalties as their building on an NC licensed work 
>> precludes them from making commercial use of the work they built on and 
>> so they can't be paid royalties for their work.
>
> That is _not_ what the NC license states.
>
> One of the ironies of the creative Commons licenses, is that the NC
> one is the only way that makes an explicit mention of royalty
> payments, and that they may be collected.

I agree, and this is my favourite nit with the NC license!  It took me ages 
to get my head around this, but maybe it's actually quite simple.  It's 
assumed (I think by the cc license authors) that a professional musician 
will be registered with a collection society.  Therefore their right to 
collect royalties on NC released work is _not_ waivered.  So, the license 
doesn't add or remove any barriers for the collection societies or 
professional musicians it preserves the royalty status quo.

In terms of license clarity, I think this is confusing to the nth degree. 
Keeping in mind that NC is the only license which does not waiver collection 
society royalties, it adds a commercial sting to a _strictly_ non-commercial 
license.  I appreciate the licensee vs licensor aspect, but none the less 
it's still confusing when other commercial friendly licenses do waiver 
royalty fees, including the most clear-cut commercial-friendly BY license.

Why?  Well, I'm assuming "look no waiver" was added to pacify the collection 
societies and their signed up professional musicians who were persuaded in 
the early days of CC to release stuff into the pool for remixing via 
ccMixter et al.  NC protected their work from commercial "leaks", yet still 
offered them a slice of the payment for radio/blog/youtube play etc. (as a 
contributor).

The double-sided sticky irony :

Whenever I release under NC and a small radio station plays my work, they 
have to pay the collection society irrespective of me being registered or 
not.  The collection society then keeps the money (*cough* shares the money 
with their artists).  I cannot opt out of this or waiver the fees, or even 
re-route the collected fees to a charity of my choice without becoming a 
fee-paying signed up member of the society....which is a commercial "merry 
go round" if ever there was one.

A musician wanting a truly "money-free" license, where there's no 
commerciality guaranteed end-to-end (unless negotiated with him/her 
directly) AFIK cannot use any of the CC licenses.  He/she will be guided 
towards NC as the solution by the various automated systems and general 
advice and away from SA licenses which are maybe more suitable for his/her 
purpose.


Sorry if this slightly moved things off topic.

Kev

> xan
>
> jonathon
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