[cc-community] CC+ Logo Pointing To My Own Website?

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Mon Jun 30 19:05:37 EDT 2008


Michael David Crawford wrote:
> What they'd need to clear with me is not having to ShareAlike.  Most of 
> those who have already asked to use my music wouldn't have wanted that.

i.e.:
automatically licensed By-SA
via CC+, licensed for commercial derivation without SA (or By?)

> I appreciate your effort on my behalf.  But maybe my usage of CC+ is 
> improper, and may not have been anticipated by the folks that created CC+.

IMHO, this is one of the most important use cases for CC+.

This is, BTW, exactly how Trolltech makes money from their GPL-developed
libraries. So there is precedent.

> At the bottom of the sample "Plus" graphic, it says "COMMERCIAL 
> LICENSE".  Given that I already grant a commercial license to everyone 
> with the BY-SA and without any need for the Plus, what would be better 
> wording to use at the bottom of my Plus graphic?  "LICENSE EXCEPTION" 
> seems too arcane.

At the risk of stirring controversy, I'm going to suggest you go back to
using "COMMERCIAL LICENSE".

Then, I'm going to suggest that you nix the "Some Rights Reserved" logo
button that you use for the free downloads, and instead use a specific
By-SA logo (i.e. with the person-in-circle, and looped-arrow logos
incorporated).

My reasoning:

1) For "commercial users" (i.e. the people who are going to want to pay
you to remove the ShareAlike requirement), the term "Special License"
isn't sufficiently appealing. They want to quickly learn how they can
license the work to put in their advertisements or whatever. They will
be looking for the word "commercial".

Purists will observe that this is because they are clueless about CC
licensing. However, that is not important to YOU. YOU want to sell a
license to those folks, and you can't if they don't contact you, and
they won't if they don't find what they expect. More likely, they'll
just be scared off by the CC logos and think there's nothing there for
them. You don't want that.

2) For "free license users" (i.e. the people who are perfectly happy to
sharealike and attribute), the "Some Rights Reserved" button is a
turn-off, because it almost invariably is used to label "CC-By-NC-SA"
licensed content (e.g. if someone is research music to use in a free
software game, they are usually not going to want NC-licensed music).

The hazard of having a "commercial license" logo right next to the "some
rights reserved" logo is that it will signal to such users that you must
be using an NC clause, and they may not investigate far enough to notice
that you are actually using By-SA. (This is, from your PoV, the main
reason to be wary of the word "commercial" on the other button).

So, instead, I propose making the By-SA logo specific to the By-SA
license, so it is immediately clear which license you are using.


I think that's a better solution for attracting both kinds of audiences.
What do you think?

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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