Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Glenn Otis Brown <glenn AT creativecommons.org>]

> It's not totally clear to me what the situation is if I want to  
> license a
> work for free reproduction/distribution provided that the
> person/organisation reproducing the work does not profit from the
> reproduction/distribution, but also want to allow commercial use  
> provided
> that I receive royalties from the commercial use. Is there a license
> combination that allows for this?


Good question, Mike.  I'm cc-ing our public archived email list,  
licenses AT creativecommons.org, so that there is a record of this  
question.

Our noncommercial option prevents licensees from making a profit off of  
selling your work -- without first asking and striking a separate deal  
with you.  Say you put a photograph out under a noncommercial license.   
Then say my for-profit magazine wanted to use it as a cover shot.  We  
would be required to strike a separate one-off deal with you to get  
that permission.  The structure is basically what you describe:

> In other words, if you aren't making any money out of it, distribute  
> it all
> you like, but if you are, I want a share.

Note that exceptions to the noncommercial provision must be negotiated  
between you and the would-be moneymaking licensee, ad hoc.  It would be  
mighty complicated to write a noncommercial provision that somehow made  
such "payback when profit" an automatic feature of the CC license.


Hope this helps.  Please remember to reply-to-all so this winds up back  
on the licenses@ list.

Thanks,

Glenn



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Glenn Otis Brown                                       
glenn AT creativecommons.org
Executive Director                                                       
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(cc) creativecommons 		                                  f  
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