[cc-community] On The Need For A Stronger Copyleft For BY-SA 4.x

drew Roberts zotz at 100jamz.com
Mon Jan 30 21:21:03 EST 2012


OK, so I already posted a link to this:

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2012/01/ontheneedforastrongercopyleftforby-sa4x.html

 but don't recall much response so I will post the whole thing here in case 
people were leery of following the link:

On The Need For A Stronger Copyleft For BY-SA 4.x

For those of you have not run into copyleft and its relationship to Freedom 
before here are a few links:

What is Copyleft?
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/

What is free software?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Definition Of Free Cultural Works
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

OK, so let's consider the the following situation and see if this is really an 
acceptable situation.

Billy Bloke spends some time searching around on Kompoz and Jamendo and finds 
a bunch of BY-SA songs.

http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/advanced.search.project?keywords=rock&userNames=&licenseId=102&sortCode=1&sortDirection=1&projAdvancedSearchForm_jamLifecycleCode=2

http://www.jamendo.com/en/tag/rock?license_minrights_c=1&license_minrights_d=1

Billy listens to a bunch and then chooses a bunch on the theme Night. He 
listens a bunch more and picks some that go together and will fit on a CD.

He puts together this CD.

Let's assume that this CD fits the bill of the BY-SA definition of 
a "Collection" as per 1.b. of the license.

Therefore Billy Bloke gets a copyright on this collection. Nothing in the 
license for the songs says that he has to put any particular type of license 
on this collection. Billy chooses to go with no license at all and keeps his 
copyright ARR (All Rights Reserved).

Billy starts selling copies of his CD which he has titled Night Dreams. It 
turns out he has decent taste and the CD starts selling well.

The songwriters and musicians who wrote and recorded the songs notice these 
sales and decide to try their hand at selling copies of the CD to their fans 
at gigs.

Billy sues them for copyright infringement and wins. The musicians face huge 
statutory damages and are told they cannot sell copies of the CDs without 
Billy's permission. Billy refuses.

They chat about this online for a good while and one gets the bright idea to 
use most of the songs but replace a few. They start selling that Collection 
of songs.

Billy sues again on the grounds that their CD is a derivative of his. He wins 
again and they pay again.

Is this really the situation we want to exist with regards to Free Copyleft 
works and copyrighted collections?

all the best,

drew 


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