Share-Alike licence bug - makes radio broadcast impractical?

Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller sloyment at gmx.net
Fri Jan 16 13:24:45 EST 2004


Hi David and all,

On Wednesday 14 January 2004 23:11, David Chan wrote:

> Consider the following scenario:
>
> 1) I release some sheet music under a Creative Commons
> Share-Alike licence.
>
> 2) You record a CD of this music (also under a Share-Alike
> licence).
>
> 3) Music Radio FM wishes to broadcast the music during their
> program.
>
> To broadcast the music, Music Radio FM would have to follow it
> with an announcement saying "and the licence for that last
> piece is available at
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/" - or else read
> the whole licence out.  In practice, this makes music licenced
> under a Share-Alike licence very awkward for a conventional
> radio station to use.

This is a quite difficult situation, because the listeners should 
be free to record the music from the radio and share it alike. 
This is only possible, if the music is licensed to them. Now, 
consider the following change in your example:

 2a) The radio station pays a DJ to remix the recording. 

As this is an in-house production, and the music is not 
distributed to anybody, the remix remains non-free, first. Now, 
the radio is going to broadcast 'their' remix.

At this point, a copyleft (=freedom preserving) license should 
try to preserve freedom by requiring that the work is licensed 
to everybody or not broadcasted. However, as long as the radio 
station makes no statement that the work is licensed to 
everybody under the terms of the license, it is not licensed 
this way. (In theory, the radio station might also choose to 
ignore this requirement for whatever reason. The upstream author 
could then sue the radio station, but the radio listeners might 
never get their free remix.)

If a copyleft license requires to announce the license next to 
the song, this is however very inconvenient, as you noticed 
before.

The solution might be that copyleft clauses are limited to 
distribution, just like in a free software license. The right to 
broadcast (and other things) could be granted without any 
legally binding requirement. In any case, there should be 
information available how people can support free music by 
keeping their remixes free. 
 
- - - - -
I also see another problem: The CC licenses do not explicitly 
mentinon broadcasting. They only allow to perform the work. I do 
not know if under US law, the term 'performing' includes 
broadcasting, but AFAIK, under German law, these are completely 
different things. So, it seems that in Germany, the current CC 
licenses do not allow broadcasting at all :o(


cu,
Thomas }:o{#
-- - http://217.160.174.154/~sloyment/ - --
"Look! They have different music on the dance floor..."




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