Development of Creative Commons licenses

["P. J. McDermott" <pjm AT nac.net>]

On 04/07/2012 08:01 PM, Josh Woodward wrote:
> 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.

Of course, to use your music in such a way, a movie studio or
advertising agency would have to comply with the terms of the license
you've offered (giving attribution, referring to the license, etc.),
which would be interesting if the license was CC BY-SA (imagine freely-
licensed advertisements on TV...). ;)

> 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.

As the copyright holder in your works, you have certain exclusive rights
in them and can give non-exclusive rights (licenses) to anyone to do
anything covered by copyright law.  It's certainly possible legally for
you to offer a license to a PRO for your work to be used in an
advertisement; that license would be completely unrelated to the CC BY
license you've offered the public.  The only ways in which there could
logically be a problem are if you've used under license someone else's
work in your music or if the PRO wants you to transfer your copyright to
them.  Are you saying that PROs simply won't license music if it is
otherwise publicly licensed (e.g. under the terms of CC BY)?  That would
indeed be arbitrary, on the part of the PROs.

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