Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Sal Randolph <sal AT highlala.com>]

I'm not a lawyer (and not part of cc) but I'm pretty sure you can't 
distribute covers of copyrighted material except under the terms of the 
blanket compulsory license mentioned previously (meaning you pay a 
fixed royalty based on your use), and I don't believe you can 
distribute these covers under a cc license at all.

It's basically because you are not the copyright holder for all of the 
material (in this case they lyrics/composition), simple as that.

You can certainly cover and cc license anything that's in the public 
domain, from Beethoven to traditional songs.

The rule of thumb is simply whether someone else owns part or all of 
the copyright.

best,

Sal


On Mar 24, 2004, at 4:01 PM, William Morgan wrote:

> Excerpts (reformatted) from Greg London's mail of 24 Mar 2004 (EST):
> > William Morgan said:
> > > What about songs (instrumentals or with lyrics) in the public domain?
> > > Can we still distribute recordings under a CC license?
> >
> > You can cover Beethoven to your heart's content.
> > If someone performs beethoven and records it, that's their property.
> > but a recording of your own performance of beethoven is your property.
>
> Ok. I was just uncertain of whether, seeing as we don't own copyrights
> on the lyrics or composition, we could still license these recordings 
> in
> the same way that we license recordings of original tunes.
>
> Thanks for your help.
>
> --
> William <wmorgan-cc-licenses AT masanjin.net>
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