For you maybe, not for me. I want my video *footage* under the more BSD-like CC-BY, not CC-SA. I don’t want to force people who would use my footage to become CC-SA too. I want to give them the freedom to use my *footage* (not necessarily music) in any way they want to, including for commercial non-SA projects. Yes, at our house we prefer the BSD license over the GPL, thank you very much.

>have you tried contacting the people whose music you’d like to use?

I have done so for 3 pieces, yes. It’s a long process of emails going back and forth — and some never reply. It’s not something I would recommend people to do.

>Also, your captcha sucks. Took me three tries to get words with characters I could actually read.

There is a little “reload” button on the captcha, click it to get words that you can read. I use reCaptcha because it offers something back. These words are part of non-digitized-yet books, and so each time you use reCaptcha, you give something back to the society.

Thing is, NC and ND aren’t free licenses, which would prevent any openPGPs from cropping up, and this is never spelled out to people choosing CC licenses or uploading to CC sites. If NC means their song will never be on youtube, I think that’s something they’d want to know beforehand.

These artists want the exposure of CC while retaining the control which NC and ND promises them, but those two only deliver bipolar licensing terms that ensure their work will never get much exposure. This issue’s complicated by the vague nature of NC and ND’s description on creativecommons.org, and that the extent of restrictions imposed by these two are never described. For example, “or ad-driven commercial sites like Youtube” would clue people in more than just “commercial applications” for NC.

The solution here, I think, to use Lessig’s terminology, is a normative one, not a legal one. It’s not that the SA is a “bad” license in the legal sense - it’s accomplishing exactly what it’s supposed to. If we (for some definition of “we”) think that BY licensed work is better for the creative community than SA licensed work, the right thing to do is not to “break” SA by making it BY compatible, it’s to encourage people to use the BY license in the first place (and to use it ourselves). For example, if you chose to contact creators to ask them for permission to use their music, you could explain the problems you have with their current license, and suggest that, rather than just give you permission to use their work, they release it under a less restrictive license.

I think that if any clause should be revised or get an optional exemption, it should be ND, not SA, since the use you would like to make of the work is in keeping, I feel, with the “spirit,” if not the letter, of ND.

Image Bob creates a work, that contains material from Alice. Now the derived work is “infected” with Alice’s work, and one would need both Alice and Bob’s permission to distribute the result. This is true no matter what license is used, as long as both works are copyrighted.

This only shows the whole “viral” metaphor is misleading, and implies the “infection” is somehow involuntary or unfair. Bob had a choice, he chose to incorporate Alice’s work, and the price is that he must comply with the terms offered by Alice (in the case of SA, that price is to share his own work in return). If he doesn’t agree with those terms, nobody’s forcing him to use Alice’s work.

You say this isn’t “too bad”, I’d say it’s FANTASTIC, the ideal, the gold-standard of licenses. What exactly is bad about it?

Anon wrote on September 13th, 2007 at 2:15 am PST:
Eugenia, have you tried contacting the people whose music you’d like to use? I’d readily imagine they’d be cool with the uses you describe.

Since you indicate that getting a call from Spielberg is somehow burdensome, (for him? for you? both?) I’m curious how you feel about Anon’s suggestion.

To my way of thinking, the :SA license provides the content creator/sharer a zero-pain way of giving to the community of creator/sharers. You put it out there and if anything gets done with your creation, you get to use it yourself. That’s the payment. If the NFL Super Bowl folks or Spielberg come knocking (how do they find you? hmm…. better attach that :BY clause) then you can sell all the stuff you created. But you’ll only get a portion, as the price they are willing to pay will have to cover all the works you derived from (hope those other creator/sharers put :BY in their license too).

But maybe you are worried about a different kind of person: the audience. If someone sees what you made on YouTube, and copies it(? is that possible? — maybe they just point their webcam at their screen) to send to their techno-phobe mother, that’s one thing. If someone puts it on a VCD and sells it on the street (!) you want a piece of that! But the :SA license prevents that from spiraling out of control. Someone selling :SA VCDs has to allow anyone they sell to to make a copy and share it. No-one gets rich on shareware unless they add value (editoral value, most likely, i.e showing the good taste to select your stuff and bypassing all the garbage). If you include the :BY clause, then you are getting free advertising, and after buying one copy of a VCD, the audience can (if they care enough) come visit your website, bypassing that guy on the street. Or they could burn their own copy: no cost to you, more exposure, word of mouth recommendation, and everybody gets that link to your homepage. Isn’t this the best you could hope for if you start out by posting a link to YouTube? They don’t pay you anything either, why should the guy selling VCDs on the street?

And the NFL could do the same thing, couldn’t they? Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that the NFL protects everything about themselves they care about: their logo, trademark, teams’, the game itself, blah, blah, blah, and they STILL want to show your :SA :BY video without the bother of contacting you for a different license. So they announce that they are going to show your video, and they announce that the terms of use will NOT apply to anything else going on during halftime (I dunno if that’s legal). And then after they play your video, they cut to a commercial, which they sold for gazillions.

Are you really bummed? That audience sitting there… is that YOUR audience? Or the NFL’s? The NFL just played your whole credit roll (:BY clause!) and everyone who is taping the game now has a copy they can use in their own home movies (:SA clause!) but only if they allow people to copy and use their content. You didn’t make a dime.

I guess I wouldn’t wish that on any artist — over exposure is what brings creative geniuses like, uh…., Britney Spears to the brink of irrelevance. It would be heartbreaking to watch, especially as you wouldn’t have to get any warning (they didn’t contact you after all).

The NFL isn’t going to do that, ever. They’ll call you first and ask for a commercial license. If the whole thing is your original creation, then you might just be a rainmaker! If you’ve got Spielberg knocking on your door, what you ought to do is slam it in his face and start the next Disney corporation. Make sure to grease the palms of all the congresscritters you’ll need to extend copyright to the limited (as required by the Constitution) duration of, say, 1_000_000 years, and you’ll be taking a walk on Park Place, building hotels on Broadway.

Of course if the NFL or Spielberg (or more likely, someone without the paid licensing team) finds this too much hassle, they might be encouraged to just licence their work under the :SA clause too. You can consider that part of your payment, too.

Just my thoughts…

In the software world, agreements were made so “similar in philosophy” open source licenses were deemed ‘compatible’. For example, you can mix BSD and GPL source code on a project without having to change your project’s license to GPL. And you can host that project’s tarball on a web site that has ads (e.g. Sourceforge, frenshmeat).

I am not a lawyer, but I think this is badly incorrect. If you mix any GPL code into any project then the whole project must be released under the GPL. That’s what makes the GPL viral.

The FSF does have a list of ‘compatible’ licenses, but that compatibility goes one way only: for developers writing ‘free’ software under the GPL, and only the GPL. That’s what the FSF thinks makes software free. If you are writing GPL software, the FSF is providing advice on what kinds of code you may incorporate into your project. If you aren’t writing GPL software, the FSF provides the advice: “Don’t write non-free code; use the GPL”. They are … ah … focused on that “free” as in “freedom” thing.

A more general solution will have to come by changing the licenses themselves. ND is easy - stipulate that applying the unchanged work to a different medium is not a derivative use. I don’t know of anyone outside of lawyers who’d think that using a song, unchanged, to accompany a video somehow changes the song. As for NC, perhaps add some reasonable estimate of profit from the use, below which it’s free for clearly-not-that-commercial-anyway use?

Also, your captcha sucks. Took me three tries to get words with characters I could actually read.

Basically, I would like for this distinction to exist, so I can use audio that it’s not necessarily that compatible with the footage, e.g. CC-SA. Also, I would like to see a “compatibility” clause, that won’t force my CC-BY to become CC-SA, but allow the licensing of A/V separately.