Weblog
2004 May
Metadata Tune Up
Upgrading to one of our version 2.0 licenses or selecting one for the first time? Consider providing optional metadata about your work via the choose license process.
Specifying a format will help people find your work via format-specific searches (e.g., a picture of the Eiffel Tower).
If your work is derived from another, you might provide a URL for the source work. There aren’t yet any tools to take advantage of this metadata, though one can easily imagine using it to navigate a trail of works that build upon each other.
In the future we’ll probably add metadata support for location, tipjar, and other work, creator, and copyright holder information. Suggestions welcome on the cc-metadata mailing list.
No Comments »Remixing creativity
CC staff favorite and Magnatune artist, Brad Sucks recently started releasing the source to his most popular song, Making Me Nervous, and asking folks to contribute remixes. Like the Jim’s Big Ego remix project we’re got going on here (which can get your remix onto national radio), Brad’s now got six remixes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and someone making a video for the original.
It’s pretty cool when artists open up the process to their fans, and let creativity flourish. Heck, even a commercial success like Jay-Z can see there’s money to be made in providing remixes that provide eventual benefit to both remixers and the original artists.
No Comments »This Week in Amateur Radio
People from all around the world get together via a technology medium that allows them to form relationships through a global, far-flung community even though they have never met face to face. It may not be the first thing that comes to your mind, but amateur radio is alive and well thank you very much.
Just ask any one at “This Week in Amateur Radio” which produces a weekly show devoted to nothing else. A 100% volunteer effort, a typical show will be at least 80 minutes. “You wouldn’t think there is that much information week in and week out about a hobby,” says George Bowen, Executive Producer of TWIAR “but other than Christmas and Thanksgiving week it’s there.” There are plenty of stories about government regulations in broadcasting but you are just as likely to hear stories like the one this week about the military radio broadcasting that is jamming garage door openers all over Florida.
Segment producers will record their own stories and then upload to one of the mirrored ftp sites which George then downloads and compiles for the show. The result is broadcast on bandwidth made available by commercial satellite feeds but according to George more and more listeners are simply picking up the MP3 version from TWIAR’s website.
These MP3s and all the material on the site used to be marked with an “All Rights Reserved” copyright because “that’s what everybody else was doing. Then I saw this piece on Creative Common on TechTV and I thought ‘Hey, that’s what we’re doing!’”
Indeed, segments are regularly shared with one of the other six such shows produced around the world from New Zealand to Europe. They are now free to do so legitimately thanks to George having put all the shows on the web under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
No Comments »Finnish CC Licence
Finland is the third country after the US and Japan to go ahead with their fully-fledged CC licences. After several months of legal deliberation the Finnish project lead Herkko Hietanen felt able to clear the licence draft and present it to the Finnish public last Monday, thus marking a major milestone in the development of iCommons. The Finns are widely seen as one of the technologically most advanced countries in Europe.
No Comments »Music licensing and American Idol
The New York Times published an article about how the music industry influences song choice on American Idol today. I’ve long suspected that contestant song choice was limited to what the show could afford to pay in licensing costs ahead of time, since the choices of songs to cover seem limited. A producer of the show is quoted heavily stating that many songs are off-limits due to audience preferences and style, but does let slip that any songs by Michael Jackson, The Beatles, and Shania Twain are completely off-limits to the show. That’s disappointing, since MJ and the Beatles are cultural icons, both selling one of the top ten music albums of all time.
Historically, there’s always been some legal leeway to allow for cover songs, though as this musician found out, the process can be a lengthy one to get the rights to everything you want to record.
No Comments »Announcing (and explaining) our new 2.0 licenses
Last night, after many months of gathering and processing great feedback from all of you, we turned on version 2.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses. The 2.0 licenses are very similar to the 1.0 licenses — in aim, in structure, and, by and large, in the text itself. We’ve included, however, a few key improvements, thanks to your input. A quick list of new features follows. All section numbers refer to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. (Corresponding section numbers may vary across licenses.)
Attribution comes standard
Our web stats indicate that 97-98% of you choose Attribution, so we decided to drop Attribution as a choice from our license menu — it’s now standard. This reduces the number of licenses from eleven possible to six and makes the license selection user interface that much simpler. Important to remember: Attribution can always be disavowed upon licensor request, and pseudonymous and anonymous authorship are always options for a licensor, as before. If we see a huge uprising against the attribution-as-stock-feature, we’ll certainly consider bringing it back as an option.
Link-back attribution clarified
Version 1.0 licenses did not carry any requirements to add hyperlinks as attribution. Under the 2.0 licenses, a licensor may require that licensees, to fulfill their attribution requirement, provide a link back to the licensor’s work. Three conditions must be satisfied, though, before a licensee faces the linkback requirement: (1) linking back must be “reasonably practicable” — you can’t string me up for failing to link to a dead page, for example; (2) the licensor must specify a URL — if you don’t provide one specifically, I have no linkback obligation; (3) the link licensor provides must point to the copyright and licensing notice of the CC’d work — in other words, licensors who abuse the linkback as an engine for traffic to unrelated sites don’t enjoy linkback rights.
Synch rights clarified
The new licenses clarify when licensees may or may not synchronize musical CC’d works in timed-relation with a moving image. Basically, if a license allows derivatives, it allows the synching of music to video. If no derivs, no synching allowed. (See Section 1b.)
Other music-specific rights clarified
The default rules for music-related copyrights can be particularly complicated, and the 2.0 licenses go to greater length to clarify how various CC license options affect music rights. In a nutshell: If you pick the “noncommercial” provision, you retain the right to collect royalties from BMI, ASCAP, or the equivalent for performance royalties; from Harry Fox or the equivalent for mechanicals; and from SoundExchange or the equivalent for webcasting compulsories. If you allow commercial re-use, you waive the exclusive rights to collect these various revenue streams. This is not a departure from the policy embodied in the 1.0 licenses — these same results would be extrapolated by any reasonable interpretation. But 2.0 just makes it all clearer, and using the language of the profession. (See Sections 4e and 4f.) Note: This music-specific language marks the first time we’ve referred to any specific statutes in the generic CC licenses. This means that future iCommons licenses will have to do the same somewhat complicated mapping exercise for each respective jurisdiction.
Warranties? Up to licensors
Unlike the 1.0 licenses, the 2.0 licenses include language that makes clear that licensors’ disclaim warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness, etc. As readers of this blog know by now, the decision to drop warranties as a standard feature of the licenses was a source of much organizational soul-searching and analytical thinking for us. Ultimately we were swayed by a two key factors: (1) Our peers, most notably, Karl Lenz, Dan Bricklin, and MIT. (2) The realization that licensors could sell warranties to risk-averse, high-exposure licensees interested in the due diligence paper trial, thereby creating nice CC business model. (See the Prelinger Archive for a great example of this free/fee, as-is/warranty approach.) You can find extensive discussion of this issue in previous posts on this blog. (See Section 5.)
Share Alike Across Borders
Version 2.0 licenses that feature the Share Alike requirement now clarify that derivatives may be re-published under one of three types of licenses: (1) the exact same license as the original work; (2) a later version of the same license as the original work; (3) an iCommons license that contains the same license elements as the original work (e.g. BY-SA-NC, as defined in Section 1 of each license). The version 1.0 licenses required that derivative be published under the exact same license only. Our tweak means much better compatibility across future jurisdiction-specific licenses and, going forward, across versions. Less forking, more fun. (See Section 4b.)
Otherwise, Share Alike Means Share Alike
After much very strong and eloquent argument from our readers and supporters, and notwithstanding the increased flexibility of Share Alike in the iCommons context, we decided not to make the BY-NC-SA and plain BY-SA licenses compatible. If you take a work under BY-NC-SA 2.0 and make something new from it, for example, you can re-publish under BY-NC-SA Japan, or BY-NC-SA 7.4 (when that comes), but you cannot republish it under any other license or combine it with BY-SA content. Similarly, a derivative made from a work under BY-SA 2.0 may be published only under BY-SA 2.0, BY-SA (iCommons license), or BY-SA 9.1, but it can’t be mixed with BY-NC-SA or other noncommercial content and republished.
Nifty new Some Rights Reserved button
Check out the button at the bottom of this page. Wouldn’t that look good on your site? Time for an upgrade, cosmetic as well as legal?
No Comments »The Way the Music Died
This Thursday’s Frontline on PBS is covering the modern music industry in an episode titled “The Way the Music Died“. It follows the industry rise after Woodstock in 1969, through music genre changes, and eventually how Napster and the Internet changed everything. It sounds interesting for musicians and music fans alike.
No Comments »DMusic supports Creative Commons and embeds MP3 files
DMusic, the oldest independent digital online music community now supports Creative Commons in their upload process. More importantly though, DMusic is providing the first web-based application to embed Creative Commons license information into ID3 tags of MP3 files. Now, when you upload your MP3 file to DMusic and choose a Creative Commons license, DMusic will put the license into the MP3 file for you. When people download your file, or share it on a file-sharing network, there will always be a way to detect the Creative Commons license.
Our hope was that one day, file-sharing networks would start to display our license information to their users, so people could easily find legal music to download. Currently search engines like Alta Vista, and applications like iRATE Radio, are able to display this information.
If you want to see how this works, check out this search result from Alta Vista’s MP3 search engine. Some of the top search results have a field called “copyright,” that contain and display Creative Commons license information pulled right out of the MP3 file.
The more MP3 files out there with embedded licence information, the easier it will be to build new applications around the distribution of legal music.
DMusic’s free service gives its members 75 MB of space to host music. In addition, you can post pictures, events, mailing lists, and even send messages to other people on the network. Check it out, and thanks DMusic — this is a big step for us.
No Comments »Jim’s Big Ego sweetens the deal — be on NPR
Jim will pick three to five of his favorite remixes from our remix contest to be featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered this June. The piece will be about this contest.
Jim says his deadline for entries will be June 10th. We’ll still feature our favorite song on our web site as of May 28th.
Post your entries to the remix contest blog post or send us an email. Given that there aren’t too many remixes up there, your chances of being heard on the radio — all over the country — are pretty good. Even if you’re not a musician, load up Garageband or Acid and take a crack at it! Maybe there’s even some good open-source music mixing software — anyone know?
If you need hosting for your remix, the Internet Archive provides free hosting for Creative Commons licensed music.
No Comments »Serendipity blogging application supports Creative Commons
Serendipity, an open-source blogging application, now has a plug-in that allows users to select a Creative Commons license.
No Comments »
