Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - Re: Share-Alike licence bug - makes radio broadcast impractical?

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: jbn AT forestfield.org (J.B. Nicholson-Owens)
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Share-Alike licence bug - makes radio broadcast impractical?
  • Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 13:33:21 -0600

Thomas Uwe Gruettmueller wrote:
> If a copyleft license requires to announce the license next to
> the song, this is however very inconvenient, as you noticed
> before.

Yes, inconvenient to the point that the work is not worth distributing the
work or people simply violate the license.

I host a show at a community radio station (non-commercial) in the US and
when I broadcast CC-licensed works, I make the effort to announce which
license is relevant. But there's no way I can read the license itself (this
is purely out of the question--a 2-3 minute song followed by 3-5 minutes of
license text? No way.).

Reading URIs aloud are virtually a complete waste of time because of their
case-sensitivity and demand for perfect accuracy (mentioning that everything
is lowercase, getting the slashes right, etc.). Frankly, I don't believe
people actually do this on the radio. I think most people see a bunch of
technical looking gibberish and skip it entirely. Reading legalese also
breaks up the flow of the show because messages on the radio can't be
ignored by the listener or dealt with later, unlike text or metadata in
files.

I'm all for letting people know what their rights are under the license for
the work, and I'm happy the work is licensed to allow verbatim
non-commercial sharing, but section 4a (of the Share-Alike 1.0 license)
where one has to provide the license or a pointer to the license is quite
obtuse for radio airplay. Finally, on this point, I concur with the FSF
that it's not future-proof to deal with URIs in this way.

I'm not sure how to fix this, but the radio is an awkward medium to get
specific things like license terms and technical things like URIs.

> I also see another problem: The CC licenses do not explicitly
> mentinon broadcasting.

I don't understand why the CC licenses are so particular about media at all.
What's so bad about licensing to distribute, perform, etc. in any medium? I
have been told this might not work in Germany (from an article I read on
debian-legal explaining how one cannot license distribution in unknown
media), but in a lot of other places it could work. Put another way: what's
so special about phonorecording or digital delivery that they deserve
special mention?

Thanks.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page