Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

> uh oh.  So a "cover", where something is re-recorded
> cuts the rope to the originator?  Even though they
> created the seed idea?  Not only that but the
> conditions of his/her original license for the work?

Uh, I've been trying to keep up, but seem to have
lost track of which hypothetical scenario you are
talking about here. BY or NC or SA or what?

First, nothing "cuts the rope" to the original author.
I'm not sure where that came from.

The most "rope cutting" that could happen is Alice
creates a song, licenses it CC-BY, and Bob comes
along and creates a derivative. Bob can then license
the work however he wants, as long as he attributes
Alice.

That's the thing about any license that is NOT copyleft,
such as CC-SA or GNU-GPL or something: if you license
the work, you can always make the derivative more restrictive.

If Alice creates a work and licenses it CC-NC.
Bob can create a derivative and license it CC-NC-ND.

If Alice creates a work and licenses it CC-BY,
Bob can create a derivative and license it
All Rights Reserved as long as he maintains attribution.

The one license that doesn't let you change the license
is a copyleft license, and for CC, that's ShareAlike.

Second, CC-BY is a nearly Public Domain license.
If Alice creates a work and licenses it CC-BY,
then Bob can come along, and sell copies of the
CC-BY work, and not pay Alice a cent.
Bob could even create a derivative, attribute Alice,
and license it All Rights Reserved, preventing Alice
from making money off the derivative.

If you're using CC-BY, you're licensing away ALL rights
with teh requiremetn that you get attribution.

Third, ShareAlike is a copyleft license, but it still
gives away commercial rights, which means if Alice
creates a work and licenses it CC-SA, then Bob can
sell it without giving Alice any money.
However, where the difference shows up is that if
Bob creates a derivative, he can't make the license
any more restrictive, meaning that Alice can sell the
derivative just as easily as Bob can sell the original.
Anyone can sell any version of the work.

If you want to invoke some sort of commercial restriction,
the only one to do it is CC-NC. The other licenses,
CC-By, SA, ND, don't have any commercial restrictions,
so they don't prohibit someone from selling the work,
and all the licenses but SA allow someone to license
a derivative more restrictively than the original work
was licensed.

So, if you create a work and license it CC-NC,
then no one can sell it without your permission.
If the work qualifies in some way for a
"compulsory license", then someone could sell the
work and pay you money because the work is still
a normal copyrighted work, it's just got some
rights that have been licensed around. But it still
qualifies for a compulsory license.

Someone could create a cover and pay you the compulsory
license fee. And if they use that approach, then it
falls under whatever rules apply to the compulsory
license laws, and have nothing to do with CC-NC.

Even if you license the work CC-NC-ND-BY, if a
compulsory license law can be applied to the work,
the person can ignore the NC-ND-BY, pay you a
compulsory license fee, and get whatever rights
they get from that piece of law. And they can sell
the work, and not license the new work CC-NC or anything.

You need to think of CC licenses as "in addition to"
whatever compulsory license laws might apply to the
work, if any. Just like you can license the work
publicly under CC-NC-ND-BY and sell someone a license
to do whatever they want with the work in parallel,
the same can be done with a compulsory license.

IANAL, TINLA, YADA, YADA,
Greg