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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Need clarification: What is "commercial"?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Need clarification: What is "commercial"?
  • Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 10:37:11 -0400 (EDT)


> So only the cover version of a CC-licensed song
> qualifies for full copyright protection, correct?

Alice creates a song. It is automatically put
under All Rights Reserved by copyright.
Alice then adds CC-NC-ND-BY to her song.

Bob comes along and likes Alice's song.
He decides to use the compulsory license
approach to create his own cover of the song.
He pays some amount of money, and creates
his version of the song. Alice doesn't like
it, but she can't stop him.

Bob keeps his version under All Rights Reserved.

Alice's version is still ARR and CC-NC-ND-BY.


> What a litigious state we'd be in then, if people were
> swiping copyrights away from musicians simply by
> making cover songs!

Compulsory license is a good idea, except it is
hard to expand to all types of works. There is
no compulsory license to cover sampling or remixing,
there is only the compulsory license that handles
Bob singing Alice's song as a cover.

What then happens is the gummint has to decide how
much money Bob has to pay Alice for sampling her
record or remixing it or whatever. And I'm not yet
convinced having the gummint come in and establish
numbers for every combination and permutation is
a good idea. Personally, I think there are bigger
fish to fry with the current set of copyright laws
that I'd rather focus attention there. DMCA, DRM,
infinite copyright terms, etc.






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