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[Nic Suzor <nic AT suzor.com>]

Hi Damian,

First off, I have to apologise that I couldn't reply to you sooner -
hope it's not too late.

The Australian ports of the Creative Commons licences are now in their
final stage of drafting. They should be released later this month, I
believe. If you need to licence sooner than that, you can use the
international licences.

Creative Commons licences sound perfect for your use. You will have to
talk to you publisher first, because if they have an exclusive licence
to your content, you may have some trouble licencing under less
restrictive terms.

If you want people to be able to rip and share the music from your
commercially distributed CD, you will have to indicate that clearly (on
the CD case, in the liner notes or on the CD itself). You can release
the music with a traditional licence on the CD, and then release the
songs separately on the Internet under a CC licence (subject to the
terms of your agreement with your publisher), but this might not achieve
what you want to do. Technically, this would mean that users have the
right to download copies from the Internet, but they still have no
right to rip and share the CD that they bought.

I would suggest talking to your publisher and trying to get the CD
itself released under a CC licence. Most likely you would be looking at
an Attribution-NonCommercial licence. NonCommercial means that no-one
else can use the work for commercial purposes, without talking to you
(or your publisher) first. This way, you can still offer the CD
commercially and expect the same sales you would normally see.

You may also want to impose some conditions on modification. If you want
to restrict people from remixing your music, you can add a -NoDerivs
term. Alternatively, you can use the -ShareAlike term to force anyone
who makes changes to your music to make it available for others down the
line.

If after talking to your publisher you still have concerns, I suggest
you get expert legal advice from a solicitor in your area.

Hope this helps, and keep us updated on how you go!

Regards,


Nic Suzor
nic AT suzor.com

Damian [Tue Jun 22, 2004 at 09:07:37PM -0600]:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just subscribed to the discussion and i was wondering if I could get 
> an update on where CC licences for Australia are currently up to and how i 
> might be involved. The archives are looking pretty sparse.
> 
> I am a writer/author of musical works that is interested in using Creative 
> Commons licences to distribute music. In particular i am wondering if i can 
> use Creative Commons to reserve 'some rights' on our CD publication which 
> will be released in August. The idea is to allow people who buy the CD to 
> legally do what they will do anyway, burn the cd for their friends, rip it 
> to MP3 and P2P fileshare it. We are not against such activity but would 
> also release the CD commercially through an exclusive licence with our 
> publishing agent. If anyone has any advice about that scenario it would be 
> greatly appreciated.
> 
> cheers,
> Damian Lewis
> 
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