Re:Why the CBC banned Creative Commons music from its shows
by mechanical_fish on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @09:01AM
(#1783160)
Don't think of it as a blanket ban. Think of it this way: They paid a service a flat fee to give the producers access to a big library that is 100% cleared. If you are a producer, and you surf that official library, you can use anything you hear. No danger of mistake. No danger of misinterpretation. It's effortless and guaranteed. Economy of scale, baby.
Creative Commons? Not so much. There's nobody to pay a flat fee to. [1] So you have to look at the license of every piece of music, and you have to make sure you've correctly matched the music up with the license. ("Oops, I thought that I was using the music from this webpage, but...").
And then, if we believe the public statement, the majority of the CC music will have some kind of "noncommercial" restriction. At which point you can just forget about it. Sure, a lot of the music will have a cheap sticker price, but just as with patents (where trolls with prima facie frivolous claims can nonetheless extort money from you) you've got to deal with the overhead. At minimum, you need to get some of the legal department's time, and they need to identify the correct rightsholder, and fax them the paperwork, and get the signature back. But maybe you also need to offer money. Maybe you need multiple rounds of back-and-forth. You are a public radio station. You are not awash in money for staff lawyers. You are going to beg your boss for permission to go through this process, and your boss is going to tell you to use the music library that you've already licensed with the flat fee.
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[1] Actually, I don't know how the music industry works, but presumably you can license your music under multiple licenses, just as with software. So you can have a CC noncommercial license and license your music for commercial use via a music service. Of course, when someone uses the music service they don't need to mention the CC license, and they don't.
Re:Why the CBC banned Creative Commons music from its shows
by pierrefar on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @01:07PM
(#1784073)
Interesting point about having an industry body for CC-licensed content. I know someone at CC and I just forwarded this dicussion to him. Maybe they can do something.
Creative Commons? Not so much. There's nobody to pay a flat fee to. [1] So you have to look at the license of every piece of music, and you have to make sure you've correctly matched the music up with the license. ("Oops, I thought that I was using the music from this webpage, but...").
And then, if we believe the public statement, the majority of the CC music will have some kind of "noncommercial" restriction. At which point you can just forget about it. Sure, a lot of the music will have a cheap sticker price, but just as with patents (where trolls with prima facie frivolous claims can nonetheless extort money from you) you've got to deal with the overhead. At minimum, you need to get some of the legal department's time, and they need to identify the correct rightsholder, and fax them the paperwork, and get the signature back. But maybe you also need to offer money. Maybe you need multiple rounds of back-and-forth. You are a public radio station. You are not awash in money for staff lawyers. You are going to beg your boss for permission to go through this process, and your boss is going to tell you to use the music library that you've already licensed with the flat fee.
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[1] Actually, I don't know how the music industry works, but presumably you can license your music under multiple licenses, just as with software. So you can have a CC noncommercial license and license your music for commercial use via a music service. Of course, when someone uses the music service they don't need to mention the CC license, and they don't.