by-nc-sa with commercial rights to a collective

Kevin Shrieve kevin at lumiere.net
Tue Nov 18 17:24:07 EST 2003


I am interested in forming a collective of artists (starting with 
musicians) who would use an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 
license with an agreement that commercial rights for their works and 
derivatives would belong to the collective.  The organization would 
work at building a system of supporting creative tools for the 
collaborators (and file format specifications to maximize 
interchangeability) as well as energetically attempt to sell the 
creative works.

The expectation is that eventually, allotting relative authorship 
(and distribution of profits) would become impossible (or too much 
trouble) to work out, and that we would therefore not attempt to 
accurately distribute the bulk of the funds collected, but use them 
to enhance the services that the organization could provide to the 
collaborators.

I know that a lot of questions arise that would need to be answered 
for this to take root and thrive in the real world, but what I am 
hoping to get feedback on here is how to approach the licensing.

If we use the by-nc-sa license, then (I assume) each and every person 
who participated in the evolution of the work would need to give 
approval for the terms of the commercial use.  I suppose all members 
could agree when joining the collective that any works submitted to 
the pool would be licensed with CC's by-nc-sa and that commercial use 
of them would be handled only through the collective.  Do you think 
this is the best approach for realizing what I have in mind?

Would Creative Commons have any interest in a variation of the 
by-nc-sa license that allots commercial rights to an entity ("X") 
that is to be named in the blank space provided by the license?

Thanks for any help thinking this through.

Kevin Shrieve

http://www.mp3.com/DreamArtScience/




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