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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Fanfic-enabling license?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Marcelo Resegue <marceloresegue AT gmail.com>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Fanfic-enabling license?
  • Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 04:14:28 -0200

The original author may use his work for commercial use, even if it is licensed under by-sa-nc. The author reserves the commercial use for himself, and he is not giving you that right. That's all. He may even license his own work under a proprietary license for, for instance, a movie.That means:
1. Using CC by-sa-nc he gives everyone the right to use, modify and distribute his work, provided they are not doing it to make money (commercial), they share with the same license and they tell everyone that's the author's work.
2. Using another license he gives a movie company the right to make a movie, and that movie (derivative work from the original author's work) is under a proprietary license, not CC.

Note that the original author retains ownership of his work, so he may dual license it using CC and proprietary.

In the case of derivative work licensed under CC-by-sa-nc, things are different. The original author gave permission to others to create using his work as a base, so he retains ownership of the original work, but he doesn't own the derivative work -- that's the problem, nobody has the right to use the derivative work commercially.

The original author could contact the second author (the one who created derivative work) and ask for permission to use (re-license) the derivative part of the work (what he added to the original work). Note that he cannot sell that to anyone else, only the original author. And he cannot use it commercially even if the original author decides to use it commercially (he doesn't have that license, unless of course the original author re-licenses under CC-by-sa).

The whole point is, any derivative work is property of the second author, not the original one under current CC-by-sa-nc. And the fact that the original author doesn't know about the work is irrelevant (you cannot invent penicillin today, even if you don't know what it is: Louis Paster already invented it; and even if you get there by independent means it won't become yours invention).

Maybe, there could be a even more restrictive CC license for that end. Let's call it now CC-kp-sa-nc: Creative Commons keep property, share alike, non commercial. That means the original author gives anyone the right to use, modify and distribute the work, but he keeps authorship of any derivative work; that others may distribute that work and the derivative work under the same license only for non-commercial use.

Something to think about: will such a license be good for the world? Will it bring freedom because more people would adhere to it, or will it prevent people from going to "better" licenses? I don't know.

BTW, I'm not familiar with American law, but the principles are probably the same all over the world (most of it anyway).





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