Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Kent Mewhort <kmewhort AT cippic.ca>]

Thanks for your well thought-out responses, Diane.  My concerns about the new "Share" definition remain, as per my inline comments below:

You comment provides a great opportunity to clarify an important dimension of the license.  Section 2, not the definition of Share, contains the grant of rights to licensees, covering actions otherwise reserved to the Licensor, including distribution rights. “Share” on the other hand is the event that triggers the the license conditions.  Said differently, only if the licensee both exercises the rights granted in Section 2 and shares the Licensed Work (or an Adaptation in licenses allowing their creation) does the licensee have to comply with the license conditions in Section 3.   For those familiar with GPLv3, you can think of “Share” as the rough equivalent of “convey” in this regard.

 

With that in mind, since Section 2 expressly grants the right to “distribute” the Licensed Work, is your concern addressed?

No, this is actually exactly what my concern entails: that the license expressly grants the right to reproduce and distribute a work, but even a broad exercise of these right does not necessarily trigger the obligations under Section 3.  I think the present definition of to "Share" is too narrow.

For example, consider a scenario where I find and download and a collection of songs licensed under CC-BY-SA.  I put together a compilation CD with these tracks, some without any changes and some that I remix.  I burn a few hundred copies and sell them.  I don't think I would have to provide any attribution whatsoever, or share it alike under the same license.

I clearly implicate reproduction and distribution rights when I sell these CDs, but not any of the rights listed under the definition of to "Share".  It's not a communication, as least as far as communication rights are usually defined under copyright law.   It's not making it available "to the public", but rather it's a series of individual, one-to-one commercial transactions.

The same could even apply to an online music download service in the vein of iTunes: no attribution required, no share-alike required.  Such a download music service engages in a series on one-to-one, private transactions; and, arguably, a download rather than a stream does not implicate communication rights either.