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Are Creative Commons Licenses Even Enforceable?

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TaoPhoenix:
We are talking about you being able to take a CC-BY licensed work of art, ... and then later not being able to prove that contract existed in the first place, or that it allowed commercial use, or the creation of derivative works.
-app103 (August 26, 2013, 05:44 AM)
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I both want to "assume good faith" while giving a wink and nod to malice. But I sorta see the "proof it existed" as "sorta the easy part" in the sense that me-as-reuse-artist saw *something* to even think they were in CC-land at all. So for example doing a "Save-Page-As--Webpage-Complete" with a timestamp should "sorta work". I know, you can get all fancy about how to certify it, but let's stay simple "in this paragraph" so we can go to the next batch of issues down.

I'd hope that a CC-BY license should be one of the easier ones to use. So far they seem to be holding up, because in the few early cases, it seems they started boiling down to rather simple other aspects. Club Owner Club owner #1 said he was using only CC music, but he was mistaken and/or bluffing, so he lost, but only to the extent those other songs got in there. Another one ended up being about Personality Rights and not CC.

But when Club Owner #2 proved he used CC music only, he won.

What we need is a crispy case where someone uses a CC-BY song, maybe in a movie, it goes viral, and then the owner gets grouchy and tries to wiggle out of it. CC-BY is essentially about exposure, an implicit "piggy back on your marketing" tradeoff. So in the rare case someone hits it out of the solar system, that "exposure only" will have to do, with no $, too bad you didn't bet better on yourself.

Vurbal:
It's worth noting the issues app103 has pointed out are the inescapable result of how modern copyright has evolved as a 1-size-fits all regime. It started as soon as guidelines designed to fit printed publications were extended to cover music. With every additional content and media type it has essentially become a complex web of kludges required to handle exceptions. This would be true even without the current level of industry interference and control.

The similarity between literary works, research reports, musical compositions, theatrical scripts, movie screenplays, and computer code is purely cosmetic. Add in performances, broadcasts, and various types of permanent and transitory digital copies and that illusory link disappears. Even if you begin with the assumption that the premise of copyright is protecting creators, at the very least it would require a complete ground-up overhaul.

In reality, though, the merits of copyright, or lack thereof, are irrelevant. Its real world effectiveness has always been dependent on technological limitations which have long since ceased to exist. The question we need to be asking is simply this. What can we do to reward, enable, and empower creators? If we begin with anything more restrictive than that we only reduce our chances of finding the best answers.

app103:
What we need is a crispy case where someone uses a CC-BY song, maybe in a movie, it goes viral, and then the owner gets grouchy and tries to wiggle out of it. CC-BY is essentially about exposure, an implicit "piggy back on your marketing" tradeoff. So in the rare case someone hits it out of the solar system, that "exposure only" will have to do, with no $, too bad you didn't bet better on yourself.
-TaoPhoenix (August 26, 2013, 10:05 AM)
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Ah, but then would their song ever have become popular at all without that CC license? Would the artist die as an obscure nobody without that exposure? What he does with his free fame after that is up to him. Releasing an album and taking advantage of the free publicity he got from the movie to sell it, would be the intelligent thing to do.

I think that CC license would have been him betting he would be famous if he had the chance to be heard by the masses. How could one bet better?

TaoPhoenix:
Ah, but then would their song ever have become popular at all without that CC license? Would the artist die as an obscure nobody without that exposure? What he does with his free fame after that is up to him. Releasing an album and taking advantage of the free publicity he got from the movie to sell it, would be the intelligent thing to do.

I think that CC license would have been him betting he would be famous if he had the chance to be heard by the masses. How could one bet better?
-app103 (August 26, 2013, 10:23 AM)
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Of course! I agree!

I was just trying to make a hypothetical argument on why the concept wouldn't hold up under a "strict" test.

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