

Why the CBC banned Creative Commons music from its shows - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/10/cbc-radio-fans-crabby-over-creative-commons-snub.ars

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pierrefar
But there are non-noncommercial CC licenses, and I'm sure there is a lot of
content licensed using them. The "mildest" CC license merely asks for
attribution. So why the blanket ban?

On a related note: the definition of noncommercial use is quite malleable in
that it is not defined in detail in the license. In the 3.0 version of the
license ( <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode> ) , it
states:

[You may not use the Work] _in any manner that is primarily intended for or
directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation._

I've found that what that actually means in practice is a bit of a grey area.
A very insightful survey was conducted by Creative Commons asking "What is
non-commercial use?". The results make for very interesting reading:

<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127>

My favorite gem: _On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is "definitely noncommercial"
and 100 is "definitely commercial" creators and users (84.6 and 82.6,
respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally
as "commercial"” However, more specific use cases revealed that many
interpretations are fact-specific._

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

\---

[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.

~~~
pierrefar
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.

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thinkalone
> "Hard to imagine this kind of give and take on a National Public Radio
> page."

What? Why? That seems like a cheap shot. NPR has an ombudsman who addresses
issues with programming, and the producers of various public radio programs
are easily accessible and responsive. If nothing else, All Things Considered
and Weekend Edition frequently air letters that are critical of their coverage
and respond to concerns that listeners have raised.

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almost
I think I'm missing the point here, it sounds like what has been banned is the
use of non-commercial CC licensed music in places which may qualify as
commercial sometimes. That sounds pretty sensible. It's either that or go to
each individual artist and negotiate a commercial license which sounds like a
pain to do.

~~~
zacharypinter
Yep. Seems like the whole issue was blown way out of proportion.

~~~
spot
Nope, they banned all CC works instead of noncommercial ones.

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mjgoins
Creative Commons should never have considered the notion of 'Non Commercial'
licenses, for this very reason. They should have learned from the software
world that non-commercial means non-free. [Edit: the CBC response is of course
misinformeed, and they could simply have filtered out non-commercial licensed
CC material]

~~~
DrJokepu
The problem is that creative professionals have to be a lot more protective
about their work than software developers.

While a software developer who's good enough to write successful open source
code will always find a well-paying job, creative professionals have to fight
very hard to get jobs, especially if they don't have a very wide network of
connections yet.

~~~
_delirium
There are also a few big specific issues that come up in music a lot, like use
of music in advertising. Musicians generally either: 1) don't want their music
to be used in advertising, seeing it as cheapening it; or 2) want to be paid
for it, seeing it as a major revenue stream. A CC-licensed work without an NC
clause would allow use in TV ad jingles for free, which a large proportion of
musicians don't like the idea of, even if they're otherwise pro-sharing.

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zach
The NonCommercial licenses are popular -- four times as popular as non-NC on
Flickr -- exactly because they're not generous. And that's including
ShareAlike licenses which the CBC would presumably be excluded from using as
well.

And for all we know, out of that less than 20%, many may not turn out to be
comfortable with commercial use anyway. On the other hand, you can guarantee
that nearly everyone in a commercial licensing pool knows what the deal is.

I also think of probably the most notable cultural "remixing" of the past few
years, the Obama Hope design, famously discovered to be derived from an AP
photographer's image.

Would its designer, Shepherd Fairey, been any better off using a photograph
with a CC-NC license? No, since in fact the first thing he did after creating
it was to make hundreds of posters and sell them on the street. He would have
been much better off using a licensing pool, like the CBC uses, or iStockphoto
(where the Twitter whale debuted) rather than a CC-NC, or even another CC-
licensed photo. Indeed, iStockphoto has arguably done more good for creators
of cultural works than Creative Commons has.

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nkassis
Maybe someone working with Creative Commons Canada can make a similar catalog
available to them? Artist could sign up online with their music and right
there provide the rights to their song and a link where to find them.

Just an idea but it might solve their main issue with the music.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's a great idea, but the question is: Who is liable when the catalog makes a
mistake?

If I just run an open wiki for artists I'll be sued to death when some joker
submits an obscure John Lennon track with a bogus name and an equally bogus CC
license attached.

So I've got to do _some_ due diligence, and charge a fee to cover the cost of
that due diligence. And I've got to take out insurance to cover the risk that
I make a mistake, and to cover the inevitable lawsuits. (Because, even if I
employ perfect lawyers, my company will be sued. Baseless lawsuits happen, and
they still need to be defended.) Lo and behold, now I'm in the music licensing
business. Just like the company that the CBC is employing.

The question is: Can my CC-music-licensing business be run at a profit? Or is
it doomed to go bankrupt? Apparently the CBC hasn't found a supplier who has
solved this problem. Maybe that's because they haven't looked very hard; maybe
not.

My take-home lesson at this point is that CC licensing is great as far as it
goes, but it isn't a substitute for an actual public domain, or even for a
compulsory licensing scheme. I believe Lessig warned us about this.

------
akozak
CC blogged about the CBC issue here:
<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23766>

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tibbon
What the CBC seems to miss however is that even NC CC music can still be used
for commercial purposes- you just have to get a licensing agreement, as you
would for any other music out there.

Most CC artists would be thrilled to be used on the CBC and would probably
charge very little for that usage. They just won't want it on a Budweiser
Superbowl commercial without their knowledge, consent or compensation. Or at
least that's my view on commercial usage of my work.

~~~
storm
You seem to be missing that the CBC buys One Big Library (APM), and thus isn't
in the business of talking and negotiating with individual artists at all.

I'm not going to defend that kind of approach to radio - particularly not
taxpayer funded radio which has the potential to have far more breadth and
depth in its content than commercial radio - and I suspect it is a relatively
new innovation, inflicted by the current clueless management at CBC.

Like many Canadians I still mourn the loss of the amazing Brave New Waves
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_Waves>), and there's _no way_ that
all or even most of the obscura that was being played on that show was in some
giant pre-licensed library of music. I suppose that cancelling one-of-a-kind
shows like that is an aid to 'getting greater efficiencies out of the content
management pipeline' or some such nonsense.

~~~
stan_rogers
I dunno. Brent [Bambury] would go through moods where there's be nothing but
long-string ambient installations playing for a week or two at a time, and
that could be really annoying. I preferred the weekend show out of Vancouver
that occupied the same time slot on Friday and Saturday. In any case, yes,
that music was royalty-paid through ASCAP/BMI who handled further details.
That was true even if an indie musician dropped by that afternoon with a fresh
basement-recorded cassette. Things were much simpler then...

~~~
storm
My recollection is that Patti Schmidt ran a more rigidly structured ship: 1
hour of broad and relatively palatable stuff, 1 hour artist profile, and then
2 hours of miscellanea, with the final hour often being the _really_ out-there
installation stuff. Even when that last hour was unlistenable chin-stroking
stuff, though, I still greatly appreciated that a show that would play it
existed on the dial.

But yes, things were much simpler then. The demise of BNW seems to have
coincided with the transition to satellite / podcasts / streaming for the CBC,
at which point I can only assume that navigating licensing issues got a great
deal more difficult. Even the single archival clip of BNW that CBC offers for
streaming, from 1984, bears the notice _Due to copyright issues, there are no
songs in this clip._. That's just dismal.

------
Agathos
Damn you, Cambridge Brewing Company!

