New Copyright Licence Allows Remixing In UK

BearJ writes "Yahoo is reporting that Creative Commons is set to launch a new copyright licence in the UK that will allow for 'remix' use. Technically this use of another's works are illegal. Next month's Wired magazine will contain a CD licenced under this scheme, so sampling is permitted. More info on the Creative Commons site."

Comments

Coolness.

[mind21_98]

This is great news for UK people. Is remix use illegal in the US also, or does it qualify under fair use? In any case, Creative Commons will soon spread around the world. :)

Re:Coolness.

[justkarl]

As a remixer/producer myself, I know a little about this...

Remixing in the U.S. is complicated; perhaps moreso than sampling. If a record label pays you to do a remix, then you obviously don't have to pay any royalties on it. The problem is that labels won't generally let you release a remix unless you own rights to do so. Which is expensive. If you release a remix for free(on the internet for instance), and you do not own the liscence, you can still get in trouble because it's still enough to constitute infringement/piracy.

Re:Coolness.

[justkarl]

I really wish that the U.S. would push for this kind of thing, though. Too bad we're too republican.

This doesn't change anything.

[Anton Anatopopov]

If I want to sue someone for breach of copyright I still can. This seems like a publicity stunt to me.

Re:This doesn't change anything.

[Lehk228]

please remove your head from your ass, it is a license that artists can rlease their work under which allows remixing.

RIAA are shooting themselves in the foot

[tod_miller]

The more they restrict, the more they free those who support the industry to move thier support to groups such as creative commons, and artists will decide to use thier license.

As I said before, now all we need is a way of publishing music cheaply... d'uh... :-)

When those people who are trying to make inroads into the industry for thier musical talents, not business acumen, are able to harness music publishing like mp3.com (or ogg.com!) then we will see people *signed* on for music deals that have purely e-distro rights.

And for steve 'monkey boy' ballmer, who tried the old half snide remark on apple earlier - apple is poised to become *the* company that signs on thier talent. Want to produce exclusive content for itunes.com and get paid? Do you note own a webcam and write shit poetry? do you not want to be a britney-a-like? then sign up! (of course, they should use traditional 'demo tapes' instead of allowing every 14-17 yo wannabe to shreik at us.

Hardware
File formats
Network
Content
Artist

Sounds like a good tie in to me.

Just for reference:

Developers developers developers developers developers *slight hoarse, cardiac indicating squeak in voice* developers developers... developers.

Step backwards?

[Anonymous Cowdog]

This might be a step backwards. A more worthy goal might be to work toward getting affirmation that all such sampling, perhaps with sample size limits, is covered under fair use. By promoting a license that explicitly allows this use, it seems CC is validating the view, recently upheld in one single court case, that sampling is never permitted under fair use.

It's a bit as though they had come out and published a new "linking policy license" that web sites could post to explicitly allow other sites to create inbound links. Would that help the overall cause of discouraging bogusly restrictive linking policies? I'm not sure that it would.

Re:Step backwards?

[DrSkwid]

perhaps you should know what you are talking about

the UK has no "Fair Use" so nothing is covered under it

Re:Step backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

No "Fair Use" in the UK? You mean all those newspaper reviewers quoting parts of the books they review are breaking the law? You'd better tell them, Dr Expert, the fate of the UK mass media is in your hands!

Re:Step backwards?

[DrSkwid]

there is no fair use enshrined in UK copyright law

just ask all the teachers who got into trouble for photocopying stuff

Re:Step backwards?

[benito27uk]

There are numerous elements of fair use included in UK Copyright Law, including a section on copying for educational purposes:

From the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1998: Reprographic copying by educational establishments of passages from published works

Re:Step backwards?

[Anonymous Cowdog]

>the UK has no "Fair Use" so nothing is covered under it

Oh, but it does.

And actually whether a country's law enshrines this kind of right or not has no bearing on whether the right exists. Governments recognize, enshrine, and respect rights, or do the opposite. They do not grant rigths, or create them. In other words, rights simply exist, separate from governments.

For a license to explicitly "grant" a right that according to common practice should be universal, risks encouraging the overall deterioration of people's ability to enjoy that right.

What if - put yourself in anothers shoes

[tod_miller]

You write a song, for peace on earth, for instance, or more slashdot, saying how good *BSD is in comparison to another *BSD. [ok that has sparked interested! you sick sick people! :-]

Someone samples it and parodies it! EEeeek!

They make it sound like you preffer the other BSD and taint the very foundation of what you said :-(

I dunno, maybe that would be covered under free speech - maybe this is ok...

All I know is I think the remixed Bush speeches are better than the real thing!

Clarification of UK law

[Andy_R]

(IANAL) The article states "Technically this use of another's works are illegal". Ignoring the grammatical mishtake, that's not exactly true. The UK law states that you cannot use a 'significant portion' of a copyrighted musical work.

The problem is that this phrase is hopelessly ambiguous, and there is no case law to provide guidance - the music industry seems to have realised it's got a problem here, somehow ensures that a judge never gets to hear any such case, they are all settled out of court.

Re:Clarification of UK law

[WolfWithoutAClause]

"Technically this use of another's works are illegal" Use of another's works is 100% *legal*- IF you have their permission. This license is just a way of giving permission; in exactly the same way that GPL gives permission in the software domain.

Looks like it's full of holes to me

[Andy_R]

From the 'Lawyer code' version of the licence...

"Noncommercial sharing of verbatim copies permitted" - use of the word 'verbatim' seems to preclude lossy compression, format conversion, and almost anythin else you can think of.

"You must either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative Work(s) or transform it into something substantially different from the original Work. " - without definitions of 'insubstantial' and 'substantial' this is meaningless at best, and at worst actually prohibits remixing!

However, the biggest problem that I can see is that the licence does not force the creator of the original work to state that the work is actually theirs to re-licence, so if they stole a drumbeat or two from James Brown, anyone who used their track as the basis for their work is guilty of the crime too.

Re:Looks like it's full of holes to me

[tod_miller]

On the first point - recompressing this would be a derived work, and you might want to keep control over the quality and completeness of your work.

On the second point - yes they have been a bit lax here.

This license is GPL for creative works. Now, full GPL is not really nice for an artist. If Davinci was around he wouldn't just sue, but physically maim and torture those who draw the monalisa with a spliff or a moustache on posters.

If you make an image or music, it is your 'baby' like Gary Larson put it.

Code is also like this, but there is less aesthetic, or even more appropriate, less [person opinion]. It either works better, or it doesn't. [let snot talk about interface design for a moment]

So we need a free license, open for creative works, text, music and art.

Stock art uses many licenses, that generally are not 'public domain'. This allows ANYTHING to happen, altered, non-altered, and you do not have to recognise copyright. They do keep copyright, but allow you do anything you want, royalty free (under open license).

Music - if you want, you could have a completely closed license. It is mine, but freely distribute unchanged. (no mention of payment, sep. issue)

Fine, this works for me, and many others. If you want a license that gives XYZ permissions, make them brutally clear, not suggested.

I would say either make it a stock like license, where you basically GPL it.

Now, what it says is, either distributed it UNMODIFIED, or use little bits in your own work, but your own work must be freely distributable UNMODIFIED or people can use small bits of your work.

mmmm. Maybe a GPL/LGPL choice needs to be made.

Either it is freely distributable unmodified, nothing else, or you can modify and distribute as much as you want however you want, giving the same right and license, OR you specify a metric for the modifiability of your work, and this metric is imposed on all other licenses [or not]

Work A says 10% maximum of it may be sampled. Work B uses 9% of work A. Since it never breaks A's license, B could say C,D,and E can use 100% of it as an input.

So by default, we could say sampling is 10%... but what about max 10% of a song as original material can be composed as maximum 10% of final derivative work.

{difficult for trancey songs with lots of identical repeats :-)

Now, then it would be possible for track C to break A's license by sampling track B under the more freely quantified license, and taking A's component and making it 50% of its content (it might be a shorter track)

Perhaps '%' of derivative work is important, but unwieldly.

This is important though, I think authors would like to give over such freedoms to fans [legally] to promote thier creativity.

The key is distribution of the work afterwards.

Re:Looks like it's full of holes to me

[julesh]

You must either use the Work as an insubstantial portion of Your Derivative Work(s) or transform it into something substantially different from the original Work. " - without definitions of 'insubstantial' and 'substantial' this is meaningless at best, and at worst actually prohibits remixing!

"Substantial" in this context is actually a word that is reasonably well defined in legal circles, and which has a lot of case law that can be used to determine what is substantial and what isn't.

Also note that two opposite meanings (substantial and insubstantial) are used; this should have the effect that for any particular cut-off point you define for what is substantial, the same use of the work is legal, as long as you are consistent in that definition. I think this is actually quite well phrased, and will almost certainly be validated if it ever goes to court.

'allows' remixing?

[mmkkbb]

most remixes are done at the request of the copyright holder. or do you mean "mash-ups", which are sure as hell NOT remixes.

Re:'allows' remixing?

[DJayC]

Most popular remixes are done at the request of the artist (or copyright holder), but there are many not-so-popular remixes of songs that most likely weren't asked for..

ie: Cotton Eye Joe Techno Remix, Super Mario Bros Rap Song, Zelda Techno Remix, and then of course the JayZ-I-Just-Got-Acid-Pro-And-Can-Add-Loops-To-An-A capella-Remix ... you catch what I'm trying to say?

Re:'allows' remixing?

[mmkkbb]

heh, there's a reason that those aren't popular!

Re:'allows' remixing?

[DJayC]

Exactly.. but my point was, there are most likely more "unofficial" remixes of a song than "official" remixes of the song... I was responding to the comment that "most remixes are requested" ... I don't think that's the case.

You raise a good point about popularity though.. those less popular wouldn't really be concerned with copyright laws... but look what happened with The Grey Album (Jay-Z Black Album + Beatles White Album)

Re:'allows' remixing?

[szyzyg]

I don;t know where you buy your vinyl, but my local record store is covered with white label remixes - not Mash Ups. I'll even create remixes of tunes to set my DJ sets apart from the rest of the world.

Sure, there are plenty of current releases that get the remix treatment at the request of the publisher. But there are just as many unofficial remixes of old tracks which weren't approved. Sometimes a popular white label will get licensed properly if the original copyright holder is happy with it, but this usually happens after the remix has become a hit with DJ's.

Verbatim? Not necessarily.

[Rufus88]

use of the word 'verbatim' seems to preclude lossy compression, format conversion, and almost anythin else you can think of.

One could argue that one doesn't need to be Rich Little in order to "quote somebody verbatim".

What do you mean technically illegal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, making copies for your friends of somebody else's software is illegal...taking somebody else's code and using it in your own software is illegal...oh, wait, unless they've released it under a license that allows it. Same here, what's the problem?