Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>]

On Wed, 2006-25-10 at 18:03 +0200, Bram @ Freesound wrote:
> I'm guessing there might be a legal difference between a sound recorded 
> by someone and a sound generated-and-recorded by someone.
>
> Some people consider their samples (or recordings) entire works of art 
> as such.
I think they'd be correct. By selecting an environmental sound to sample, the sound maker has applied creativity and thought to the process. The work is thus a protected _expression_.

I think there's a good analogy with a photograph. But, yes, this isn't terribly cogent.
> 2. which -if any- of the CC licenses could or can be used for sound 
> samples and what are the differences -in both legalese and idiot-proof 
> wording- between using those particular licenses.
If I were you, I'd give contributors a choice of license to use. Since Freesound is a collection rather than a single, cohesive work, it's not really that important that every piece of the collection have the same license. You can give some choices for different contributors' needs.

The four "core" licenses that don't include "NoDerivatives" are probably all useful for different kinds of sound artists, with possibly also a public domain dedication as the most liberal license. I agree that the Sampling license is more useful for long pieces of music than for, well, samples.

So, anyways, my suggestion is to give a choice of these five licenses:

• Public Domain (any use whatsoever without restrictions)
• Attribution (any use, but must give credit)
• Attribution-ShareAlike (any use, must give credit, must make any other works free to others, too)
• Attribution-NonCommercial (only non-commercial use, must give credit)
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (only non-commercial use, must give credit, must share derivative works with others)

I think the default should be public domain, at least for works less than 10 seconds in length.

I'm not a lawyer, but there aren't a lot of them out there who know squat about the CC licenses, so there you go.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan AT prodromou.name>