[cc-community] cc licensing of covers of ARR songs?
Jessica Coates
j2.coates at qut.edu.au
Wed Jan 14 22:07:21 EST 2009
The Australian licence is in s55 of the Copyright Act 1968. It's implemented by APRA/AMCOS, our main music collecting society. Here's their information on it: http://www.apra-amcos.com.au/musicconsumers/makingrecordingsretailsale/makingaoneoffrecordingforretailsale.aspx
It's intended to allow cover songs, but it's a pretty complex provision - AMCOS, for instance, seems to think that it would let you musically interpret the work, but not change the lyrics or create a parody.
As for Drew's comment about better education materials - most definitely we could do with more information out there about downstream licensing and CC. I touched on this (though from the other angle) in relation to derivatives under the BY and BY-NC licences in my presentation at the Legal Day in Sapporo.
The problem is, it really is ridiculously complex, and not always intuitive, how downstream licensing works. Writing it all up in a way that is useful to artists will be quite a challenge. Particularly when we're talking about things like licensing under statutory licences, which change from place to place. I suspect in the end we might have to resort to at least a bit of 'ask your licensing body'. And from experience I know even they don't often really know how their licences work.
Jessica Coates
Project Manager
Creative Commons Clinic
Queensland University of Technology
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