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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Need clarification: What is "commercial"?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Eric Garner <ejgarner AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Need clarification: What is "commercial"?
  • Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 16:25:07 -0700 (PDT)


--- Greg London <email AT greglondon.com> wrote:

***SNIP***

> So, if you create a work and license it CC-NC,
> then no one can sell it without your permission.

Okay, this is the basic principle of NC that everyone
"gets'.

> 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.


Whoa...I'm not too sure about this line of thinking.
NC music *does* qualify for compulsory licensing, so
isn't this like saying BMG can sell a Warner music
track without permission just by paying the compulsory
license fee, even though the copyright belongs to
Warner? What did I miss? The non-commercial part of
"Non-Commercial" is pretty straightforward.

> 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.

Standard copyright becomes enforceable once the
licensing terms are broken; it's right in the legal
code. Since CC licensing seems to lean more toward
direct licensing (at least per my conversation with
SoundExchange a while back), I believe the CC terms
supersede the compulsory license. ("IANAL" goes here
;) ) So if someone tried what you propose and the
licensor wasn't pleased about it, there would seem to
be a pretty good case against them unless I'm wrong. I
doubt I am, though, since what you're saying
essentially is that NC is completely undermine-able.
If that were the case, how could a business model with
a money stream based in part on direct-licensing of NC
music hold muster?

> 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.

In summary, I think this is only partially true.
Please fill in the blanks for me. :)

Eric




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