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

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.

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.