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.

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?

[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.

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.

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: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.