Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Josh Woodward <joshw AT joshwoodward.com>]

Hey everyone, I just wanted to post a few of my thoughts on the NC license from the perspective of a musician, not a legal scholar. I started releasing my music under BY-NC-SA, which I gradually shed down to BY. The decision to drop the NC clause was definitely a somewhat agonizing one. I didn't really want to give away my rights for licensing music for actual commercial enterprises for free (a movie placement, commercials, etc), but it was obviously fine for someone to use my music in the background of a family vacation slideshow on YouTube. In the end, it was the smart move for me to drop it, since the increase in exposure was huge, but the tradeoff seemed unnecessary.

It seems to me there's a clear (if hard to define legally) line between the outright commercial use of a work, and the work being used in a free-spiritied way but being included on a for-profit website. 

Another significant issue for me, which I discovered only later, was that CC-BY is incompatible with performing rights organizations. Logically, as a musician, it seems like I should be able to license my music outside of Creative Commons and collect the royalties from that. For instance, someone comes to me and wants to use my music in a commercial, but they need a traditional license because they can't provide attribution. I'm not able to collect royalties on that, since CC-BY works can't be registered with PROs. Again, being ignorant of all things legalese, there may be a good reason for this, but it seems really arbitrary to me.

tl;dr: Liberalize NC.

-- 
Josh Woodward - http://JoshWoodward.com/

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