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cc-licenses - RE: Confusion over conflicting licenses

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Sincaglia, Nicolas" <nsincaglia AT musicnow.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: Confusion over conflicting licenses
  • Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 10:06:49 -0500

Serge,

I think you are looking at these licenses from a similar perspective as I
have been lately. On the surface the CC licenses are very innovative and
exciting. They make it appear that the creative community can by-pass much of
the legal complexities of the world and just move on and allow creative
people to further create. But as I start to think in more detail about
practical business considerations and managing ones own liability, it occurs
to me that the CC license still lives in the "all rights reserved" legal
environment and it really does not help anyone by-pass any of the legal
complexities. Let me explain.

If you would like to distribute any CC work for commercial use, you as a
distributor are taking on an equal amount of legal risk as the original
creator. How do you know the person who posted the creative work really is
the rightful owner of that work? I personally have found people posting major
label artists on sites intended for CC licensed work. I was able to recognize
those artists because they are fairly popular American artists. It sort of
scared me because it occurred to me that I might not recognize a fairly
popular French or German artist and think the track they posted was really
licensed under a CC license. If I were to take that work and incorporate it
into another work and distribute it, I would be 100% liable for illegally
distributing someone else's copyrightable work. It doesn't matter that I was
defrauded by the poster of that work. This is also the case if someone
licensed you a copyright work that they did not own but at least in that case
you could point to a signed contract and show that the person who licensed it
to you was a scam artist. You can't really do that with CC licenses. It will
be hard to find the person who posted that file illegally.

This is also the case with sampling. I have downloaded content under the CC
license that clearly has illegally sampled content in it. No where in the
content posting does it indicate that uncleared samples were used in the
making of this material. The poster either is not familiar with the current
sampling laws or does not care. Frankly, it does not matter to the
distributor. If you distribute this content and the original copyright owner
finds out that their work was illegally sampled they will come after the
distributor of the content. The distributor is as liable as the creator in
the use of these uncleared samples.

Another practical business problem I see with the CC license is the No DRM
restriction. I understand why the restriction is in the license but from a
practical business perspective this restriction really limits ones ability to
market and distribute CC licensed content. If I wanted to use a CC licensed
piece of content on a project with other non CC licensed content, I could not
distribute the work in its entirety using common distribution methods. Non CC
licensed content owners may insist on protecting their content with DRM or
encryption but it would be a violation of the CC license to do so. So
distribution methods such as encrypted DVDs, digital distribution through
commercial sites such as iTunes, digital satellite broadcasts, digital radio
broadcasts or even ringtones or ringtunes will violate the CC licenses. As a
business person, I see this as a problem because with any business success I
achieve through distribution, new distribution opportunities will present
themselves using distribution methods that were built around encryption and
DRM and it will limit how successful a project can be.

So I would like to stress that the above examples are not a problem with the
CC license itself. I am still a big fan of the Creative Commons. I think what
they are doing is still very innovative but I now recognize that it has its
limits from a commercial perspective. The CC licenses allow people with small
projects and limited distribution to move forward with their plans. If you
have loftier goals, it is just too risky and limiting to use only CC
licenses. You need to delve in to the legal complexities of copyright law and
negotiate the old fashion way for the license to use and distribute the work
and indemnify yourself as much as legally possible.

So in your examples, I would suggest you contact the owners and try to
negotiate with them to have all the licenses reflect the restrictions you
will require for your project. I don't see any other way.

Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: Serge Wroclawski [mailto:serge AT tux.org]
Sent: Sun 5/1/2005 6:42 AM
To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts
Cc:
Subject: Re: Confusion over conflicting licenses



On Sun, 1 May 2005, Greg London wrote:

> CC is about a spectrum of licenses from gift economy
> to market economy, from sharealike to noderivatives,
> from publicdomain to noncommercial. And each of those
> uses has different requirements, therefore different
> licenses, some of which are incompatible with other
> licenses, and incompatible with the wishes of downstream
> authors.

CC is an enabler to moving away from the standard All Rights Reserved
to
allowing work to be used differently and shared.

Every time I've gone to one of the people whose work I want to use and
said what I wanted to do, they've all said "Oh, go ahead and so
that.", to
which I've sometimes responded "Why don't you change the license to be
less restrictive and then I wouldn't have to ask."

One licensee actually flaunts a huge license violation on his web
site. He
has a ShareAlike license and then says that his work was used by a
television show. Of course the television show isn't ShareAlike.

People, especially software-esque people would have a tendancy to
want to
use ShareAlike.

People who think "I'd sure like to get paid for a commercial use of my
work" would think Non-Commercial.

I don't have a direct problem with the licenses, only that choosing
the
license may not realize that putting extra restrictions on will have
unforseen consequences. This is something we can make more clear to
people.

- Serge Wroclawski

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