Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Kevin Phillips (home)" <tacet AT qmpublishing.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts"
<cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 4:17 PM
Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Need clarification: What is "commercial"?


>
> > The fragmentation comes from Alice's gesture of
> > making something free (to share at the very least)
> > which is then levered into commercial space and
> > suddenly becomes very un-free.
>
> Ah, so the concern is Alice records a song,
> licenses it CC-SA, then Bob comes along and
> uses the compulsory license to make a
> Non-Free cover of Alice's song. And Bob's
> version remains AllRightsReserved.
>
> I believe that is a legal possibility.

That's part of the issue, yes.  It totally goes against Alice's intention,
and could potentially kill off interest in the song.....

> I don't see it as a huge issue.
> Where copyleft becomes extremely important
> is when you have a community project that
> spans many, many generations of derivations,
> many, many contributers. In that situation,
> copyleft is a strategic move in game theory
> terms that removes the possibility of the
> community fracturing and working against itself.
> Everything copyleft must remain copyleft.

In a utopian world.  Sadly....

> And while technically Bob could use a compulsory
> license to make an ARR version of Alice's original,
> what that would more than likely do is give
> Alice's song a huge amount of exposure, and attract
> a whole bunch of new contributers who want to
> make a CC-SA derivative of her version.

This is where we differ in view.  I think what is more likely to happen goes
like this : Alice's original isn't quite "polished" because she didn't have
a big-studio budget so she finds a niche following which she's happy with.
Meantime the big-studio budget version created by the "commons-snipe" label
an all new RIAA member,  sells in the 100s of thousands.  Not large-scale
sales, but big enough to fund a marketing campaign, an MTV video, a youtube
theme page, a clever website.  To all intents and purposes Alice's song
isn't really Alice's song in perception any more, it's the song of the
latest in-vogue soap starlet.

Alice is pissy.  She wanted to share her song and allow it to grow as you
described, instead it got song-jacked and now nobody wants to know about it.
Ironically, the more popular it becomes in the "commons" the more it is
likely to be song-jacked.

I'm not this much of a pessimist usually, but I'm aware of the music
industry's aggressive approach to marketing and land-grabbing, hell we see
it on TV day in day out - no crystal ball required.  It's not so far-fetched
when you consider the money saved on development of a song and/or evaluating
it's potential for popularity.  They could even spin-it as "helping the cc
community".

> i.e. I believe a compulsory license can only
> give you one "generation" of derivative from
> the original.
>
> As for money, Alice will get paid for
> the compulsory license.

One generation is all it takes, Alice made a few quid but hates the song.
;)

> And Bob may be able to have exclusive rights to the
> money to his version of the song, but my guess is
> that were Bob's version to become hugely popular,
> you'd see people go to Alice's original, make some
> derivatives that are reminiscient of Bob's version,
> or even better than Bob's version, and those would
> get free airplay.

Uh oh.  No way.  Firstly, "airplay" is mostly a commercial space at the
moment, there's no "airplay" for cc works other than small internet sites
(the ones who aren't put off by NC terms).  Bob's version is commercial,
least path of resistance for the radio station and lets face it, if you have
a big-name soap-star vs cc-Alice......

> So, I think that for the situation of using a
> compulsory license on a CC-SA song, I think the
> Free version of the song will get plenty of
> benefit, Alice will get some money for the
> compulsory license, and the new people drawn to
> Alice's community could all contribute to the
> Free version to make it even better than Bob's
> version.

Then we simply need to sit and wait.  You gave the best outcome scenario for
Alice, I gave the worst.  The middle ground should be interesting, at the
very least ;)

Kev