Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Hans Fuchs said:
> Hi
>
> When I publish a song with cc-nc. Someone remixes it and publishes
> without a non-commercial clause. Someone else remixes the song and sells it.
>
> Is this possible?

possible yes. legal no.

your_version_of_song -> (transforms into) -> Alices_version -> (into) -> 
Bob's.

Bob's version is still a derivative of your song and is still
restricted by whatever license you applied to the original.
This license inheritance is true for most CC licenses.
(CC-Sampling being one of the exceptions to this rule)

> If not, who is at fault?

In my example, Bob is a very bad man and should be drawn and quartered
immediately. If you don't happen to own four good horses, then you could
try an email informing him of the error of his ways while saving up
to buy good stock.

> I ask this because I'm not sure whether I should apply sa or not.

the problem isn't with NC. The problem is either Bob doesn't know
how the license works or Bob knows but doesn't care. In the first
case, a friendly email should fix the problem. In the second case,
he's ignorign the license and more licenses won't help. send a cease
and desist letter and prepare to get a lawyer.

CC-SA is a gift economy license. It keeps the work available to
the community regardless of who modifies it. CC-SA allows
anyone to sell the work, but any modifications are
community property.

If you made your work CC-SA and Bob took it and modified it and sold it,
CC-SA would mean you could then take Bob's version and sell it as is,
or modify it even more and sell that.But Bob could sell that version too.
Anyone can sell any version of a CC-SA work.

CC-NC is a market economy license. It keeps the work pretty much
to the original author, but allows hobbyists and fans to play around
with the work, pass copies around (for free), and create derivatives.
No one but the original author can sell the work.
But any derivatives created by fans can't be rolled in by the
original author to sell without the fan's permission.

CC-NC-SA is a weird license that is neither a market economy or
gift economy license. I do not recommend anyone use it.
It allows anyone to create deriviatives for noncommercial use,
but still has the CC-NC problem of a derivative created by a fan
cannot be used commercially by the original author.

CC-NC-SA is like CC-NC except that the original author can use
fan's derviatives for non-commercial use. Which is pointless.

So I'd recommend sticking with either CC-NC or CC-SA.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
I do not represent Creative Commons.

Greg

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