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Creative Commons Launches CC+ License

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the all-about-just-gettin-paid dept.

E1ven writes "Creative Commons has this week released their CC+ protocol, which provides a way for authors to allow other people to commercially reuse their work, and give them a pre-negotiated fee or percentage. It makes it easy for people to release the Material under CC-No-Commercial, and then have a way to charge for commercial use if companies are interested."

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. That's smart... by SerpentMage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Finally a smart license... Open Source, but if you want binary or commercial, here are my terms... That lets the developer play nice with Open Source, but gives those that don't want to be nice to Open Source an avenue to buy, thus letting the developer playing nicer with Open Source...

    --

    "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
    "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
    1. Re:That's smart... by gnuman99 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Bull. Sorry. There was *always* a way for OSS copyright holders to relicense under proprietary licenses. There are *many* examples of GPL projects that have a commercial side. For very easy examples see MySQL and Trolltech's Qt.

      Or see the stdc++ library in the GNU GCC toolchain. It is listed under GPL but with the exemption that any software linked to it doesn't imply that it must be GPL as well.

      The addition to the CC license is not even worthy of a mention as any copyright holder could do what this license implies at any given time.

    2. Re:That's smart... by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The point is the "prearrangement" I believe. So you don't have to go get permission to use the work commercially, you just have to make sure you send the checks.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    3. Re:That's smart... by Niten · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you're entirely missing the point here. Sure we've always been free to dual-license things, but many people just aren't good at writing copyright notices and the like. This essentially provides content providers and potential licensers with a consistent user interface within which to operate.

      Imagine that a publisher sees a really insightful code example in a blog entry on Erlang, which he thinks would make an excellent addition to an upcoming book. But the blog's author hasn't made clear whether this work can somehow be licensed for commercial use; or even if he has, the publisher might be having a hard time parsing the author's legalese. The publisher very well might just give up on it rather than go through the effort of contacting and negotiating with the author, and in the end both the publisher and the author lose out. On the other hand, if the author can just put a Creative Commons CC+ button on the page, the publisher can see it immediately and think: "I've seen this before and I know what it means. This work can be licensed, I can click here to find out what it will cost, etc."

      This protocol continues Creative Commons' legacy of making public licensing accessible to the common man. And I think it's an excellent idea.

  2. Couldn't you by Kamineko · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Couldn't you just license your work under CC-*, and then license out commercial licenses anyway, given that you're the copyright holder?