[cc-community] BY-SA license in the UK has non-waivered collection society fees?
Terry Hancock
hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Sun Aug 17 14:49:01 EDT 2008
Kevin Phillips (home) wrote:
> As I've mentioned before (in other threads) it kind of makes more sense to
> my simple mind that an SA license is non-waivered,
Too many negatives!
So, "non-waivered" mean "does not waive the author's monopoly on to
commercial exploitation"?
So, you approve of the UK By-SA license that you posted if it has the
effect of allowing one to collect collecting society income?
> because I see it as a
> "commercially open" license more so than NC. My understanding of SA is that
> you (the next in the chain) need to share alike otherwise you need a
> different license or agreement from me, the author (and other authors along
> the chain). If remix my music and you do share alike your remix, there's no
> restictions on you making money through ad streams or some other cunning
> route. Right? Well that seems like a whole lot more enterprise friendly
> than an NC release :) Yet the US & unported SA license contain the waiver.
Okay, now I'm confused again. Yes SA certainly allows any recipient to
commercially exploit the work. It wouldn't be a "free" license if it didn't.
Whether that is more "commercially open" or not depends on who you are.
If you are the original rights-holder and you wish to use your monopoly
on either copying or commercial exploitation to make money from the
work, then the SA license is not going to help you do that. OTOH, if you
are a recipient of the work and want to use it to make money (say by
distributing it alongside ads) then it does help.
In the end, I would have to say that both NC and SA licenses can be
"commercially friendly", but to different sorts of businesses.
It's probably just confusing to try to decide on one or the other being
"more commercially friendly". You really need to think in terms of whose
PoV you are taking and what strategy they are going to adopt.
Also I really must insist that we use the word "monopoly" rather than
"rights" -- it's really important to make the distinction: SA gives you
all kinds of "rights", but it doesn't give much "monopoly". OTOH, NC
does give you a "monopoly", but is short on some "rights".
> I would have thought with this in mind for instance, a popular group might
> want to experiement with SA, knowning that they'll at least be paid via
> their CS if their songs become popular enough to gain internet/radio play.
> It seems to me that NC has too many restrictions for such cunning
> enterprise.
Not really ... if you have to go the collecting society route, then you
are outside of the restrictions of the license anyway. At that point,
you are using the work under a separate (perhaps implicit) license, and
not the CC license at all. So it hardly matters which license you used.
The advantage to By-NC is it clearly forbids the radio play on
commercial stations unless such an extra license is used (which in turn
implies that the collecting society would have to be paid for the extra
license). With By-SA it's not so clear that the station would have to
pay anything (it's quite possible that the airplay can occur under the
By-SA license).
> Here in the UK the CS organisations seem to be very much pulling strings as
> far as the law is concerned. It took me unawares but really doesn't
> surprise me that the waiver isn't there in the UK license.
Not sure what you mean by that. Do you imagine that the CSs had an
impact on the writing of the UK version of the CC license? That seems
just a little improbable to me, as CSs don't seem to approve of By-SA in
general. But I may just be misunderstanding your point here. Also, I
don't live in the UK, so I may have some wrong ideas about the UK politics.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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