Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Blaise Alleyne <email AT blaise.ca>]

On 12-04-09 09:30 AM, zotz AT 100jamz.com wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 7 Apr 2012 20:01:12 -0400, Josh Woodward
> <joshw AT joshwoodward.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
> 
> To me, if this is indeed the case, this is just the PROs being foolish
> or actively trying to combat Artists' Freedom.
> 
> Since BY and BY-SA are non-exclusive licenses, you could offer one of
> those Free CC licenses on a recording and at the same time offer a very
> restrictive license on the same recording. The (for instance) radio
> station that has a blanket license from a PRO could pay under the
> restrictive license and be done with it or they could claim a BY or
> BY-SA use and prove it. This would likely be a lot of trouble for the
> station for no money saved. They would likely use the restrictive
> license of yours under the blanket license from the PRO.


As I understand this, as a non-lawyer musician who looked at the SOCAN 
(Canadian PRO) contract while making a decision to go CC BY-SA, it's more of 
a problem with the PROs that Creative Commons.

The SOCAN incompatibility, as I understand it, is that they require members 
to *automatically assign their performance rights* to SOCAN. If my 
performance rights are automatically assigned to SOCAN while I'm a member, I 
no longer have the ability to waive those rights in offering up the 
recordings elsewhere under the terms of a CC licence like BY-SA.

If SOCAN allowed me to selectively assign works, I could only assign works to 
SOCAN that were not licensed freely, and freely license the rest. And if 
SOCAN had a different sort of contract, where I was not exclusively assigning 
the performance rights to it, then maybe the dual licensing situation would 
be possible -- but that, I haven't investigated, whether PROs could operate 
as they do with some sort of license to performance rights rather than being 
assigned them...

I'm not sure that it's PROs actively trying to combat artists' freedom so 
much as it's a paternalistic "of course artists would want to collect 
royalties on all of their works in all circumstances" view that excludes free 
licenses, and then an utter lack of motivation to "fix the bug". I tried 
raising the concern with SOCAN, but I'm not sure they really care that their 
contract / membership agreement is incompatible with some CC licences. I'm 
not sure they understand why anyone would want to waive performance rights, 
and they think they're working in artists' best interest by helping them 
maximize royalty collection I'd imagine...

Again, IANAL, and it's been a few years since I looked into SOCAN and 
determined that I could not become a member, as an artist who uses free CC 
licences.


I'm not sure there's anything that can be done from the CC side on opening 
the possibility of some sort of dual licensing, at least with respect to free 
CC licences... from what I've gathered, it's more of a problem with PRO 
membership requirements and the assumption that they'll manage all 
performance rights for artists... not sure how prevalent that is among other 
PROs besides SOCAN...