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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."

18 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. In other news by niceone · · Score: 2, Funny

    Microsoft release the CC#.NET license which makes it impossible for people to release under the CC-No-Commercial license.

    --
    ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
  2. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    So I could CC+ license my C++ code? What if it was something for a class and I'd only gotten a C- on it? so GCC is GPL, is GGPL now CC+ licensed? I'm confused.

  3. 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.

    4. Re:That's smart... by zotz · · Score: 2, Informative

      "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..."

      That's not what this is. It could sort of become that, but it is not.

      First, CC licenses are not recommended for code. I think the still recommend the GPL for that.

      Second, I think this is only for their licenses with NC terms, so it is definitely not akin to Free or Open Source Software.

      If they make the same deal for their BY-SA license, that would be closer to what you speak of, but just not recommended for software. I for one, hope they do this with BY-SA.

      all the best,

      drew

      --
      FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
    5. Re:That's smart... by AvitarX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Easy.

      1)Come up with the terms of your non-conforming (to the GPL) distribution of product.
      2)name your license (I shall choose "QHNDASPL")
      3)QHNDASPL states "you may use either GPL, terms from 1, or QHNDASPL to redistribute"
      4)Only accept submissions with the QHNDASPL license

      This will leverage the many eyes, theoretically, and allow you to use any patches submitted.

      You would not be able to use pure GPL code and leverage what already exists (as GPL), but you could use BSD code and accept patches (if that is what you meant by leverage).

      This is similar to a lot of dual licenses that already exist, except many projects want you to assign ownership to submit. This is to make future license changes easier (see the difficulty getting Mozilla to GPL, or if it was wanted to ever get Linux to the standard GPL (not the GPL2 only it currently is).

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    6. Re:That's smart... by novakyu · · Score: 3, Informative

      Perhaps you should check the definition of free software, or the Debian Free Software Guideline (which is the basis of the Open Source Definition).

      Any license that does not grant free redistribution (not free as in beer, free as in freedom---as in that the re-distributor is free to charge money for the service, if someone would pay) is definitely not free, and most likely not open source.

      I don't know why people get these wrong impressions that "free software" == "anti-commercial", but nothing could be further from the truth. Free software is just about as Laissez-Faire, free, capitalistic economic system as you can possibly get (free from government-granted monopolies, etc.). Licenses that "play nice" with communities by "graciously" granting non-commercial uses is definitely better than completely proprietary licenses (or a lack of one), but it's only halfway there since any such license still restricts your freedom in ways that are not acceptable.

      If you aren't totally convinced still why these "non-commercial only" licenses are wrong, here's a very simple reason why: Those licenses are GPL-incompatible, since GPL does not allow addition of restrictions with small exceptions, and any project or software using those restrictive licenses is excluding a lot of code out there that is already released under GPL.

    7. Re:That's smart... by LiquidFire_HK · · Score: 2, Informative

      I am not talking about a license that disallows commercial use. As I said, Qt is licensed under the GPL. However, many commercial products are not GPL, and using Qt in them would thus not be an option. So, not as a restriction but as an additional option that you would not have if it was just the GPL, you can license Qt for use in non-GPL projects.

      Qt is dual licensed. It's not a modified version of the GPL. It is free software, because it's GPL. In fact, it's, in a way, freer than GPL software, because you can use it in non-GPL projects.

      (And of course I'm only using Qt as an example. I'm sure there are other similarly-licensed products.)

  4. 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?

  5. Sure, I've heard about this by Chairboy · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's like the original Creative Commons license, except with pointers.

  6. Cookbook like examples please? by SockPuppet_9_5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Great, but... If I were to tell this to someone, is there a real world money example(s) to illustrate this procedure?

    Say, the item I use is 1/12th the amount of major imagery in a product.
    Where's the breakover for fees if:

    1)A not intended for profit item that somehow accidentally earns a few hundred bucks
    2)Part of a presentation in a business that I would normally pay between $5 and $200 (at iStockPhoto for example) but otherwise never sees the light of day
    3)Part of a menu at a restaurant
    4)Part of a large ad campaign.

    Feel free to give a wide range of examples, or link to ones similar to these suggested ones.

    If I'm to convince others to want to use images with this new label, I'd like to know how to explain this to potential clients.

    1. Re:Cookbook like examples please? by boyko.at.netqos · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, here's a real-world example (and I was praying for something like this...)

      I'm making a documentary that I may as well plug now, www.followingalexiswest.com. (In fact, I'm making this post from LAX, having just returned from on-location filming.)

      Now, in any documentary, you typically get about 20-25:1 shooting ratio. What that means is that for every hour of actual documentary, you've filmed about 20-25 hours of raw footage. In my case, much of that is interviews - educational, important interviews.

      That would normally end up on the cutting-room floor - but there's so much educational, important information there. Once I get the stuff digitized, I'm taking a copy of all the raw footage and giving it to the New Zealand Film Archive, and uploading it online on Google Video. And I want people to use this raw footage in their own documentary projects - especially if they're students.

      But there are still "commercial" uses - indie documentarians like me - who could also use the footage. I don't want them to take it without negotiating a fair price, but I do want to let them know that it's within the realm of possibility to licence the footage without breaking the bank.

      Now, I could release it under a CC licence and sell it to commercial interests, but a CC+ licence makes it explicit that I'm looking to make money - but if you just want to muck around with it for a student project, you'll get no hassle.

      --
      I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
  7. CC+ is dual licensing by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Couldn't you just license your work under CC-*, and then license out commercial licenses anyway, given that you're the copyright holder? That's exactly what this is. You license a program under GNU GPL or any other work under CC-BY-*-NC or CC-BY-SA, and then you give alternate permission for other uses that do not conform. CC+ is just a uniform way to express such a dual license.
  8. Re:Speaking of by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think you were pretty hard on the grandparent. He sounds honestly confused, and wants to make his work available, but is worried someone will just grab it, change the name, sell it to a market, and screw him.

    It seems like a perfectly valid worry, to me at least. And depending on why he cares, there are some options.

    But, it is not a precise enough concern to deal with yet.

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  9. How do you define commercial? by Njovich · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, what are the limits of the word 'commercial'? The way I read this license, you basically can not use this for anything. Websites with advertisements have an indirect trade or profit goal, you can't use the content on something like Youtube (which is part of a for-profit company), you can't use the artwork in a GPL'ed piece of code (it allows commercial use). Even a private artwork can be seen as a work to improve someones portfolio. The potential for good would be a lot bigger if the CC licenses didn't have this limit.

    Of course, everyone should pick the license they want, but I think people underestimate just how limiting the NC licenses are for people that try to stick to the law.

  10. "Commercial Use" ill-defined? by ortholattice · · Score: 3, Interesting
    One problem I have with this and other "non-commercial" CC licenses is that "non-commercial" doesn't seem, to me, to be clearly defined. Certainly there can be blatant commercial uses that are easy to identify, but there are many situations where it is not so clear. Suppose, for example, the material is posted a personal home page, which is provided free by the ISP in exchange for advertisements. Does that constitute "commercial use"? Clearly, the ISP is profiting from the material if it is drawing people to that page and thus the ads. Who owes who what money?

    Is a Red Cross advertisement commercial or noncommercial? If the Red Cross paid a magazine for an ad containing a CC+ licensed image, then the magazine is earning some money from it, even though the Red Cross itself is non-commercial. (Or is it?)

    It is even hard to come up with examples where the use is disconnected from the slightest taint of a direct or indirect commercial connection.

    Of course, CC+ is also incompatible with GPL-licensed software. For example, a CC licensed "non-commercial use" icon in a software package would prevent a commercial entity from using it, defeating the purpose of the GPL.