[cc-licenses] Third-party licensing of works

Liz Berg lizb at wfmu.org
Fri Jun 29 17:32:18 EDT 2007


Forgive me if this inquiry is directed to the wrong discussion forum, but 
I'm new here and wanted to get some feedback on an area that I don't 
believe is covered in the CC wiki or elsewhere on the site: a third party 
licensing works under CC with permission by the artist.

Here's my scenario. I work for WFMU, a non-commercial radio station, and 
we're developing a website of free and legal music downloads called the 
Free Music Archive. We want to populate this site by approaching artists 
and record labels and asking them to license song(s) using CC (by-nc and 
by-nc-nd, specifically), to be offered as free downloads (of course under 
the terms of the CC license).

All info on the CC site assumes that the artist is licensing his/her own 
material on their own volition, and doesn't address the possibility of 
this process being mediated through a third party. Any advice for how we 
should proceed? Has anyone done this before? Are there examples of 
contracts or other agreements that third parties have used to prove that 
an artist has agreed to license a work under CC?

WFMU wants to write up a contract that summarizes the by-nc or by-nc-nd 
licenses (also providing the URL for the full legalese version of the 
license), lists songs that the artists agrees to license under CC, and 
asserts that these songs will be included in WFMU's Free Music Archive 
website. Does this kind of agreement sound kosher? Or should we approach 
this in a different manner?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

-Liz





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