Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> Audun Myhra Bergwitz wrote:
>> Wouldn't one solve the problems with NC by rather
>> having a commercial license based on percentages?
>> Ie something which says that you're free to use
>> this any way you like, but if you make any money
>> by the use you owe me X % of that in royalties (RY).
>> Any percentage of 0 is 0, so then non-commercial
>> would be anything where there's royalties=0?

The problem isn't what percentage goes to the author.
The problem is figuring out WHAT is the original
number that you take a percentage of. what it its
used by a non profit? What if its used in a manner
not primarily for commercial use? What if I put a
CC-NC work on a site, give it away for free, not have
advertising, but the site is primarily a storefront
for buying commercial works? Is CC-NC works as free
samples commercial use? If it is, what chunk of income
do you multiply by the percentage to figure out what
goes to teh original author?

Say I have a website that has a bunch of CC-ROY works
that I give away for free. But use them as incentives
to get peopleto come to my site and buy works.
Say I have 20 CC-roy works and sell a thousand dollars
worth of ARR works. how do I split that up?

If I have 20 CC-ROY songs that each want 5%, the total
adds up to 100%. Does that mean that each author gets
5% of the $1000? Because that means if its my site,
I don't get anything.

The thing is that this scenario would be commercial use.
The problem is figuring out a canned way to have a
universal royalty thing that works for every scenario.

Even if you solve that, say you decide CC-ROY only
allows direct sales, and demands a percentage of
direct sales, how does that work with CC-NC?
Can I no longer give the work away for free
for non-commercial purposes?

Being able to distribute verbatim copies of the original
work for non-commercial purposes is a fundamental ability
put into every CC license. Will CC-ROY allow that?

I don't know if you could get CC to support a license that
does not support verbatim, non commercial copying.
I don't know if I would support such a thing.
I'd ahve to think about it a while.

If CC-ROY does allow verbatim non commercial copying,
then you haven't solved the problem, you've added
an unrelated feature. You would still need to figure
out what is and is not NonCommercial use to figure
out whether a particular website or user is following
the license or not.

Greg