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Creative Commons

[This article is an excerpt from a chapter of The Human Guide to Doing Music Online by @kit]

Fortunately, there are plenty of people out there who also believe copyright is, at the very least, deeply flawed, and thanks to some of those people, we have a way to make it suck less through Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is not a replacement for copyright. The organization itself is an international nonprofit dedicated to serving the public interest, but in common parlance, Creative Commons refers to a set of seven simple, human-readable public licenses that work within existing copyright law, allowing creators to voluntarily and explicitly grant certain usage rights for their work to the public, allowing culture to be more easily spread, preserved, built upon, and celebrated.

In other words, instead of all rights reserved, it’s some rights reserved.

These licenses are all enforceable in court, and have been tested before. According to the Creative Commons organization, the licenses have never been deemed unenforceable or invalid.

From most to least restrictive, there are:

• CC BY-NC-ND – Allows free copying and sharing of the work, so long as proper credit is given, the work is not used commercially, and no remixes or derivatives are made.
• CC BY-NC-SA – Allows free copying and sharing of the work, as well as remixing and derivative works, so long as proper credit is given, the work is not used commercially, and any derivative works use the same license.
• CC BY-NC – Free copying, sharing, and remixing of the work, so long as proper credit is given, and the work is not used commercially.
• CC BY-ND – Free copying and sharing of the work, even for commercial purposes, so long as proper credit is given, and no remixes or derivatives are made.
• CC BY-SA – Free copying, sharing, and remixing of the work, even for commercial purposes, so long as proper credit is given, and any derivative works use the same license, or another compatible one like GPLv3.
• CC BY – Free copying, sharing, and remixing of the work, even for commercial purposes, so long as proper credit is given.
• CC0 – No restrictions at all. With this license, your work has been dedicated to the public domain.

Even if you fully believe that intellectual property and copyright law are good things, I strongly recommend that you give these licenses some serious consideration and spend some time learning about Creative Commons. The use of these licenses does nothing but good, after all. If you’re unsure, and your main hangup is your ability to make money, rest assured that these licenses do not affect your ability to make money at all. You can still sell what you make, people will still buy it, and like I said in the piracy section, free availability means a potentially larger audience, and potentially faster growth.

Again, I practice what I’m preaching here. Nearly all of my released music is licensed CC BY-SA, and the only reason some of my music isn’t is because I legally couldn’t do so, because I don’t own the rights to remixes. The same goes for nearly everything I write, although a few of my writing projects are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA instead, like this very post. This website is 100% ad-free – it even warns you for not using an ad blocker – so my writing doesn’t generate money from being viewed here anyway. And yet I’ve still received donations for it, and I already said in the piracy section that the voluntary donations I’ve been given for my music, despite the fact that I give it all away for free, are actually consistently more than the traditional royalties I receive. Heck, I even intend to have all of my work dedicated to the public domain through CC0 on the day I die, because I think it’s stupid to let the restrictions of copyright continue to encumber my work once I’m no longer alive to do anything with it, and I don’t expect copyright to be reformed or abolished in my lifetime.

If you’re unsure about using these licenses for fear of being too permissive, but the most restrictive licenses seem too restrictive, there is an existing tool to help you reach your ideal middle ground. Through the CCPlus protocol, you can place your work under a CC license of your choice, and then separately grant additional permissions yourself. I do that myself as well. In fact, I sort of did it at the beginning of this post, by specifying that even though the license I used for this post says commercial use is not allowed, I am okay with people making money through ad revenue or royalties when sharing or modifying this post, as long as whatever they do is not behind a paywall of any kind, or sold outright as a product. Reading that passage can be considered our agreement to those terms. I also have a dedicated CCPlus page on this website that’s more specific and applies to all my work, which I also linked to at the beginning of the post.

If you think you might one day make a big break and get offered a big time deal, and that using CC licenses would be a problem for you there, once again you have no reason to be concerned. Using a CC license does not prevent you from making other, separate, private deals that aren’trestricted by the CC license. For instance, a big movie studio probably isn’t going to be willing to release their movie under a CC license like your CC BY-SA license would require them to, but they really want your music anyway, so you are entirely free to make a separate deal with the studio, allowing them to use your music without being held to the terms of your CC license.

If you worry that someone might use your work in a way that you wouldn’t approve of, or in a way that you believe would damage your reputation by association, it’s true that under any CC license, you do not have the ability to prevent that from happening so long as they comply with the terms of the license. However, you can still do something. You can contact the offender and demand that they remove all attribution to you. No name, no links back to your pages, nothing. If they comply, great, your name is no longer associated with them. If they don’t comply within 30 days, however, the terms of the CC license become void, and you can then treat the situation like a typical case of copyright infringement, allowing you to send a cease and desist notice, and take them to court over it if you so desire. Just make sure that you can prove that you really did contact them first.

This is also true for any other violation of license terms. Commercial use with an NC license? A remix with an ND license? Your work is BY-SA licensed and theirs isn’t? In all of those cases, unless you gave explicit permission for any of those uses, the CC license is void if the situation is not resolved within 30 days of your first attempt to make contact with them, and normal copyright law then comes back into full effect. The fact that copyright applies in full does mean that fair use and fair dealing also apply, however, so if the usage that you don’t approve of falls under one of those, you still can’t do anything. But of course, that’s true even without using a CC license.

The only thing in my mind that can be concerning for some people is this:

CC licenses are not revocable.

This means that if you decide to make something available under a CC license, you can’t undo that decision. If one person got a copy of your work under that license, then even if you stop using the license yourself, that person with that copy is still free to share it under the terms of the license used at that time, and any new copies other people get from that person will remain under the same CC license. That is the reason I recommend spending some time learning about these licenses, because while I do wholeheartedly recommend that you use them, I don’t want you to make a decision too quickly if you’re unsure and could end up regretting your license choice.

There is another “downside” to these licenses specifically for musicians, being that music licensed under Creative Commons is not allowed in the YouTube Content ID system, and some less reputable commercial music distributors claim that they won’t distribute it either. I say “downside” because I think Content ID is a bad thing anyway (more on that later) and in practice, no distributor will ask, and you will encounter zero trouble by simply not mentioning it.

There are entire mountains of additional information about both Creative Commons and copyright as a whole, but I’ve said quite enough.

I sincerely hope that you consider these licenses, but even if you don’t, I hope that this (not-so-)brief introduction to copyright has helped you in some way, even if only by giving you the knowledge you may have needed to ask better questions.

[Read The Human Guide to Doing Music Online in full]