Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On Wednesday, February 02, 2005, at 12:07PM, <Sigmascape1 AT cs.com> wrote:

>First question deals with the issue of dual licensing. I've read a lot of 
>threads about it, but I need some help. Is it a common pratice for content, 
>say a photograph, to be licensed under multiple CC licenses? 

Not that I know of. Online repositories tend to stick to one license for each 
work although they may have different licenses for different works. Flickr 
allows you to use CC licenses (http://www.flickr.com/) for example.

>Is it kind of like a Magnatunes situation, a kind of try before you buy 
>thing?

The Prelinger archive have released thousands of films for free at the 
Internet Archive. These are low-resolution versions of the films. You can buy 
high-resolution versions. A similar scheme might work for static images.

http://www.panix.com/~footage/prelarch.html

Artisthousemusic seem to do a similar thing, selling DVDs of their Free music 
with commentaties and ultra-high-quality versions of the tracks:

http://www.artistshousemusic.com/ 

So if you release low-rez images for casual use and charge for hi-rez images 
for commercial use that might match that model. It's more "pay for better" 
than "try before you buy".

>My second question deals with selling content. I am looking into the 
>possibility of releasing digital artwork I have created, and selling it on 
>CDs. At the same time, I am going to make some of the same content available 
>for free via my ibiblio account and on my website. Can anyone point me to 
>other examples of people/companies selling CC'd content. My artwork is going 
>to be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Loca Records (http://www.locarecords.com/) release all their music cc-by-sa 
and sell CDs as well as having their tracks on iTMS. They seem to be doing 
well and have some amazingly cool music. There's also opsound 
(http://www.opsound.org/). And there's magnatunes as you've mentioned but 
their licensing model is weirder that Loca/opsound's flat CC licensing. 

I've personally bought CDs from Loca and opsound. I was opsounds first UK 
purchaser. :-) Call me old-fashioned but I prefer to tweak my own audio file 
parameters and have a backup of the raw data. :-)

- Rob.