[cc-community] Licenses and law interaction.

Alan Cox alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Wed Oct 27 10:49:04 EDT 2010


> 1. I put a BY-SA song lyric online.
> 
> 2. Someone comes along and adds music.
> 
> 3. My intention is that the resulting work can only be used per the BY-SA 
> license.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Is this really how things would shake out? What would be the case for it being 
> this way and against it being this way/

The general case for a derivative work is that you need to meet the
requirements of both parts in order to perform any action which requires
copyright permissions and that will include the needed rights to
modify/combine them. The case where you simply put them together and they
remain distinct works is a bit different but you still need the
permissions to copy each work etc. This is why combining CC licenses
works the way it does, and how the "viral" aspect of the GPL works.

So I cannot for example take a Microsoft Windows XP CD, add my patches to
it and sell it again giving Microsoft half the takings, nor can I add
some chapters to a Harry Potter novel and split the profit with the
original author.

In a lot of jurisdictions however note that music is special (as in
"especially broken" in some views) and if the work meets some categories
of having been published/performed publically etc it may be that as author
you have lost control of it beyond payments due under collective
licensing rules irrespective of what license was used.

The session musician bit is also misleading for two reasons.

1. Many countries have the notion of "work for hire", so eg if I hire you
to take me a photograph I own the photograph.

2. The session musician contract has in the contract that the recording
rights belong to the people hiring them.

Alan



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