Creative Commons gets it
There is only a single problem that I ever had with Creative Commons (CC), and that is its non-commercial (NC) licensing clause. NC at CC has the same meaning as in the current copyright law, meaning that you still can’t sync your video with a CC-NC licensed song if you are going to post it later on youtube! Even if the video creator doesn’t make any money off of it, youtube does, via its ads. And so this constitutes a commercial usage. Which of course sucks, because this is simply not in line with what CC users expect from CC media usage in these new realities of the Internet. More over, I am pretty sure that when most artists pick the CC-NC license to represent their works don’t realize the “youtube restriction”.
But the lawyers over at CC seem to get it. Judging from the kind of questions they ask on their latest survey about “how people understand the non-commercial term”, it seems that CC wants to fix their NC clause and appropriately change it. In other words, “non-commercial” might mean looser restrictions in CC-licensed media than what it means for your generic copyright law — depending on the case. Go fill up the survey!
I just hope that the Obama administration would get it too, but instead, they seem to be more busy trying to please RIAA/MPAA by “picking a copyright czar“. Fucking revolting.
3 Comments »
My posting to Youtube is not primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. While I agree that the line between commercial and non commercial is not always so clearly defined, I can’t see any “youtube restriction” in CC-NC.
It often happens that CC-NC works have indirect private monetary compensation (e.g. when you win an award, when you give a DVD seller some money for an empty DVD for burning the CC-NC work, when you give some money to the cafe for a sandwich at the film festival that shows the CC-NC work).
Your post looks to me a nice and clever provocation for thinking rather than a documented analysis.
> I can’t see any “youtube restriction” in CC-NC.
It is not spell out in the license. But it’s part of the US “non-commercial” definition as indirect profit. The “youtube restriction” is only one example that doesn’t play ball with the way I want to see CC work.
>provoation for thinking rather than a documented analysis.
Erm, of course. I am not a lawyer. I am a CC content creator and user. But I understand what non-commercial means in US terms, and that’s why I wrote what I wrote. While no CC musician will ever sue another user for using his/her music on youtube, this doesn’t mean that using that music on youtube is permitted by the CC-NC license. It’s about the principle of doing the right thing.
I’m with you in caring about the principle of doing the right thing. Problem is good will is rarely enough.
I guess in this case different jurisdictions have different definitions of “non-commercial”. I’m sure CC lawyers will keep porting all the changes to different Countries, Italy included.
Comments are closed as this blog post is now archived.
Lines, paragraphs break automatically. HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>The URI to TrackBack this blog entry is this. And here is the RSS 2.0 for comments on this post.