Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sal Randolph <sal AT highlala.com>]

On Jan 26, 2004, at 8:24 PM, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> Actually, now that I think of it, I've convinced myself that I _do_
> see some benefit: reducing the multiplier effect of free content
> publishing. For example, I publish a short story on my personal Web
> site and release it under an Attribution license. Universal Studios
> takes this story and makes a major motion picture that grosses $200
> million (with a kindly reference to me in the film credits).
>
> However, it turns out that I just copied the whole thing from a 1972
> collection of works by Erica Jong, and she sues Universal for the
> whole $200 million. The warranty clause would seem to me to require me
> to indemnify Universal for $200 million. If I'd never licensed it
> under Attribution, the worst I could expect would be a takedown notice
> from Ms. Jong's lawyer.

Yes, this is it exactly.  Personally I am a kind of flow-through 
aggregator of lots of various musical content (or my project is: 
Opsound).  I know there are people doing more or less illegal music 
sampling who are participating in my project.  They do this publicly 
all the time, and honestly, I'm not against it.  What worried me about 
the warranties (and it worried me a lot) is that by joining my project, 
these artists were putting themselves in a *much* worse legal and 
liability situation than if they just put their music up on their 
websites with no license notices.  And I'm pretty sure that most of 
them didn't read carefully enough to be aware of it.  I didn't get it 
until we were quite far in.  From my point of view, the Opsound project 
is about doing good things for the participants, not making their 
situation worse.  I do understand that they can't legally license 
content that isn't theirs, of course, and I emphasize that (and exhort 
people to read the license) on my site.  But I don't want to make the 
situation extra severe for people who do this kind of sampling for 
artistic reasons and may be a bit careless as they click "yes."

--Sal

http://www.opsound.org
sal AT opsound.org