Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Parker Higgins <parkerhiggins AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Alex Andrews <alex AT recordsonribs.com> wrote:

Just to underscore this point (and at risk of explaining the obvious to people on this list) that's why -NC is the license-of-choice for some of the most prominent CC license users, who happen to be more-or-less traditional commercial artists. Nine Inch Nails, Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, etc, etc, use -NC precisely because they wish to reserve the commercial rights. That's what the license does. If it were to preclude them from entering their works into the commercial realm, I think they would not be using it in many cases.

Thanks,
Parker

Equally though: our artists do what Nine Inch Nails et al (license under NC) do for precisely the opposite reason - to give their work away and prevent commercial use/reselling but allow sharing and re-creation to occur. I'd imagine this were the case for the vast majority of other net labels.

I don't think that reason is the opposite, here, but I guess that's the crux of the disagreement happening on the list. In both cases, the rightsholder is using -NC to limit the commercial use by others — what NIN or JoCo or Records on Ribs or whomever does with their own content is outside the scope of the license. 

I think the most accurate way to describe the mechanism by which the license limits certain uses is to say that it is grants some rights and reserves others. The licenses don't (and couldn't, really...in any case, shouldn't) describe how the author chooses to use their own work, only which rights they are choosing not to reserve for their own (optional) use.

Thanks,

Parker

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parker higgins
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http://parkerhiggins.net

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