[cc-community] Licenses and law interaction.

Rob Myers rob at robmyers.org
Wed Oct 27 10:39:22 EDT 2010


On 10/27/2010 02:38 PM, drew Roberts wrote:
>
> 4. The proposition is that the law makes the resulting song a joint work and
> either of us can do what we like with it with no permission needed from the
> other but each owing the other 50% of any monies we get from that.

Short answer: Not under BY-SA. Only if you want to convert to a 
proprietary licence. They are separate scenarios.

Long answer:

The underlying work whose copyright is licenced under BY-SA in your 
derivative work is a derivative work, not a work of joint authorship. 
This means that in the absence of a licence (or fair use) the copyright 
would not be shared but would go entirely to the original author.

BY-SA provides you with that licence, allowing you to use the original 
copyright and to claim copyright on your part of the derivative work as 
long as it is also placed under BY-SA. It's the complete agreement 
between you and the original author. The only consideration you have to 
show the original author is to observe the terms of the licence.

Given that the work is a derivative and that in the absence of a licence 
(or fair use) the copyright on the entire work would be held by the 
original author, if you wished to sell it under a proprietary licence to 
(for example) a movie company you would certainly need a separate 
licence from the original author.

But these are parallel and unrelated use cases and the fact that you 
need a licence in order to create or use an adaptation is addressed in 
its entirety either by using BY-SA or by getting the original author of 
a work to sign a separate proprietary licencing agreement with you.

Even if the work was a joint work, it would still be covered by BY-SA 
and BY-SA would be the entire agreement.

(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

- Rob.



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