Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> On the contrary, I'd say it's very different: There's a lot of
> difference between "indirect" profit from the free sharing
> of a work and "direct" profit by controlling the distribution
> of the work.

It'd be nice if everyone was on the same page as to what,
exactly, CC-NonCommercial meant before we went off and
tried to create Yet-Another-Incompatible-License-Option.
I can just imagine the CC-IN debate over the license
that would allow INdirect commercial use, but not direct
commercial use, and it makes my head hurt. Just thinking
about the NC definition makes my head hurt enough that
I've avoided further reading of CC's NC questionaire.

> In fact, I think there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't
> care about the indirect profit issue as long as they could
> retain a monopoly on selling CDs or whatever medium they
> chose (or on per-track download fees).

Except the person who originally brought up this idea
was talking about a "license for the record companies".
And when you look at it that way, the license doesn't scale.
If the license became so common place that most record
labels were using it on their music, I think that
secondary sites, which could allow downloads of the music for
no direct costs and make their money on advertising,
and direct sales would drop.

(1) Go to www.majorrecordlabel.com and pay 80 cents
for a download or
(2) Go to www.musicondemand.com and get the song at no cost.

as it is, I subscribed to Rhapsody almost a year ago,
for a flat fee of $8 a month, and I can listen to all
the music I want to hear there. I'm assuming that some
of my money is going back to the record company, and then
a small sliver of that is making its way to the artist.

But if Rhapsody could give the music away for free
while making money on various advertising angles,
I'm sure they'd figure a way to make the numbers add up,
maybe use Peer-To-Peer networking to share the bandwidth
and storage among the various users or some such thing.

The short of it being that if everyone licensed their
work to allow anyone to make indirect profit, then
I don't see direct profit having much of an income
potential.

If nothing else, fans could host their favorite music,
and then a decent search engine could find the music
for free rather than go to the Record Label page and
pay for it. Yes, people could buy the work as a way
of giving alms, but if that argument were to scale,
then you could simply license the work CC-BY, let folks
sell it, and then wait for your true fans to come to
your site and give you money to keep playing.

Greg

btw: everything I say here is wrong




> But clearly this is not the meaning of the current NC clause.
>
> Terry
>
> --
> Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
> Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cc-licenses mailing list
> cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
>


-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/