Why the CBC banned Creative Commons music from its shows | Hacker News Reader

Why the CBC banned Creative Commons music from its shows

arstechnica.com

68 pointsabraham26 comments

But there are non-noncommercial CC licenses, and I'm sure there is a lot of content licensed using them. The "mildest" CC license merely asks for attribution. So why the blanket ban?

On a related note: the definition of noncommercial use is quite malleable in that it is not defined in detail in the license. In the 3.0 version of the license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode ) , it states:

[You may not use the Work] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

I've found that what that actually means in practice is a bit of a grey area. A very insightful survey was conducted by Creative Commons asking "What is non-commercial use?". The results make for very interesting reading:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127

My favorite gem: On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is "definitely noncommercial" and 100 is "definitely commercial" creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as "commercial"” However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific.

Don't think of it as a blanket ban. Think of it this way: They paid a service a flat fee to give the producers access to a big library that is 100% cleared. If you are a producer, and you surf that official library, you can use anything you hear. No danger of mistake. No danger of misinterpretation. It's effortless and guaranteed. Economy of scale, baby.

Creative Commons? Not so much. There's nobody to pay a flat fee to. [1] So you have to look at the license of every piece of music, and you have to make sure you've correctly matched the music up with the license. ("Oops, I thought that I was using the music from this webpage, but...").

And then, if we believe the public statement, the majority of the CC music will have some kind of "noncommercial" restriction. At which point you can just forget about it. Sure, a lot of the music will have a cheap sticker price, but just as with patents (where trolls with prima facie frivolous claims can nonetheless extort money from you) you've got to deal with the overhead. At minimum, you need to get some of the legal department's time, and they need to identify the correct rightsholder, and fax them the paperwork, and get the signature back. But maybe you also need to offer money. Maybe you need multiple rounds of back-and-forth. You are a public radio station. You are not awash in money for staff lawyers. You are going to beg your boss for permission to go through this process, and your boss is going to tell you to use the music library that you've already licensed with the flat fee.

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[1] Actually, I don't know how the music industry works, but presumably you can license your music under multiple licenses, just as with software. So you can have a CC noncommercial license and license your music for commercial use via a music service. Of course, when someone uses the music service they don't need to mention the CC license, and they don't.

Interesting point about having an industry body for CC-licensed content. I know someone at CC and I just forwarded this dicussion to him. Maybe they can do something.

> "Hard to imagine this kind of give and take on a National Public Radio page."

What? Why? That seems like a cheap shot. NPR has an ombudsman who addresses issues with programming, and the producers of various public radio programs are easily accessible and responsive. If nothing else, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition frequently air letters that are critical of their coverage and respond to concerns that listeners have raised.

I think I'm missing the point here, it sounds like what has been banned is the use of non-commercial CC licensed music in places which may qualify as commercial sometimes. That sounds pretty sensible. It's either that or go to each individual artist and negotiate a commercial license which sounds like a pain to do.

That's incorrect. Their position is that there's not a significant amount of CC licensed music without an NC attached, and it's too difficult to tell the difference, so they're banning all CC music regardless of whether or not it's CC-NC.

Well, they had issues with using non-commercial CC licensed music in commercial situations. But instead of simply limiting their use to commercial CC licensed music, they discontinued all CC licensed music. It seems like too sweeping of a measure.

Yep. Seems like the whole issue was blown way out of proportion.

Nope, they banned all CC works instead of noncommercial ones.

Creative Commons should never have considered the notion of 'Non Commercial' licenses, for this very reason. They should have learned from the software world that non-commercial means non-free. [Edit: the CBC response is of course misinformeed, and they could simply have filtered out non-commercial licensed CC material]

The problem is that creative professionals have to be a lot more protective about their work than software developers.

While a software developer who's good enough to write successful open source code will always find a well-paying job, creative professionals have to fight very hard to get jobs, especially if they don't have a very wide network of connections yet.

There are also a few big specific issues that come up in music a lot, like use of music in advertising. Musicians generally either: 1) don't want their music to be used in advertising, seeing it as cheapening it; or 2) want to be paid for it, seeing it as a major revenue stream. A CC-licensed work without an NC clause would allow use in TV ad jingles for free, which a large proportion of musicians don't like the idea of, even if they're otherwise pro-sharing.

+1. I find CC to be very confusing, and I'm the kind of person that can tell you the differences between the MIT, BSD3, BSD4, GPL2, and GPL3 licenses. To a "normal person" it must be incomprehensible.

I think this must be because the culture of sharing has been around longer in the software community. In the music (and photography) world, it seems like this is uncharted territory, and when CC was making the licenses they asked the artists what they wanted. Nobody could agree, so every possibility became "creative commons" -- but only some of those are actually Free. Others are as proprietary as licenses get, providing the same restrictions that copyright law already adds.

I'm glad I don't produce podcasts for a living.

There were plenty of cases of CC books and other works wich allowed commercial use where some douchebag sold it somewhere. One of the most known cases was a book by Seth Godin sold on Amazon.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/please_dont_...

[Please disregard any issues on the person; the point is the almost guaranteed abuse of commercial-permissive CC licenses]

The NonCommercial licenses are popular -- four times as popular as non-NC on Flickr -- exactly because they're not generous. And that's including ShareAlike licenses which the CBC would presumably be excluded from using as well.

And for all we know, out of that less than 20%, many may not turn out to be comfortable with commercial use anyway. On the other hand, you can guarantee that nearly everyone in a commercial licensing pool knows what the deal is.

I also think of probably the most notable cultural "remixing" of the past few years, the Obama Hope design, famously discovered to be derived from an AP photographer's image.

Would its designer, Shepherd Fairey, been any better off using a photograph with a CC-NC license? No, since in fact the first thing he did after creating it was to make hundreds of posters and sell them on the street. He would have been much better off using a licensing pool, like the CBC uses, or iStockphoto (where the Twitter whale debuted) rather than a CC-NC, or even another CC-licensed photo. Indeed, iStockphoto has arguably done more good for creators of cultural works than Creative Commons has.

Maybe someone working with Creative Commons Canada can make a similar catalog available to them? Artist could sign up online with their music and right there provide the rights to their song and a link where to find them.

Just an idea but it might solve their main issue with the music.

It's a great idea, but the question is: Who is liable when the catalog makes a mistake?

If I just run an open wiki for artists I'll be sued to death when some joker submits an obscure John Lennon track with a bogus name and an equally bogus CC license attached.

So I've got to do some due diligence, and charge a fee to cover the cost of that due diligence. And I've got to take out insurance to cover the risk that I make a mistake, and to cover the inevitable lawsuits. (Because, even if I employ perfect lawyers, my company will be sued. Baseless lawsuits happen, and they still need to be defended.) Lo and behold, now I'm in the music licensing business. Just like the company that the CBC is employing.

The question is: Can my CC-music-licensing business be run at a profit? Or is it doomed to go bankrupt? Apparently the CBC hasn't found a supplier who has solved this problem. Maybe that's because they haven't looked very hard; maybe not.

My take-home lesson at this point is that CC licensing is great as far as it goes, but it isn't a substitute for an actual public domain, or even for a compulsory licensing scheme. I believe Lessig warned us about this.

Jamendo already has this:

http://www.jamendo.com/en/albums?license_class=cc_standard&#...

CC blogged about the CBC issue here: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23766

What the CBC seems to miss however is that even NC CC music can still be used for commercial purposes- you just have to get a licensing agreement, as you would for any other music out there.

Most CC artists would be thrilled to be used on the CBC and would probably charge very little for that usage. They just won't want it on a Budweiser Superbowl commercial without their knowledge, consent or compensation. Or at least that's my view on commercial usage of my work.

You seem to be missing that the CBC buys One Big Library (APM), and thus isn't in the business of talking and negotiating with individual artists at all.

I'm not going to defend that kind of approach to radio - particularly not taxpayer funded radio which has the potential to have far more breadth and depth in its content than commercial radio - and I suspect it is a relatively new innovation, inflicted by the current clueless management at CBC.

Like many Canadians I still mourn the loss of the amazing Brave New Waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_Waves), and there's no way that all or even most of the obscura that was being played on that show was in some giant pre-licensed library of music. I suppose that cancelling one-of-a-kind shows like that is an aid to 'getting greater efficiencies out of the content management pipeline' or some such nonsense.

I dunno. Brent [Bambury] would go through moods where there's be nothing but long-string ambient installations playing for a week or two at a time, and that could be really annoying. I preferred the weekend show out of Vancouver that occupied the same time slot on Friday and Saturday. In any case, yes, that music was royalty-paid through ASCAP/BMI who handled further details. That was true even if an indie musician dropped by that afternoon with a fresh basement-recorded cassette. Things were much simpler then...

My recollection is that Patti Schmidt ran a more rigidly structured ship: 1 hour of broad and relatively palatable stuff, 1 hour artist profile, and then 2 hours of miscellanea, with the final hour often being the really out-there installation stuff. Even when that last hour was unlistenable chin-stroking stuff, though, I still greatly appreciated that a show that would play it existed on the dial.

But yes, things were much simpler then. The demise of BNW seems to have coincided with the transition to satellite / podcasts / streaming for the CBC, at which point I can only assume that navigating licensing issues got a great deal more difficult. Even the single archival clip of BNW that CBC offers for streaming, from 1984, bears the notice Due to copyright issues, there are no songs in this clip.. That's just dismal.

Still- there's nothing really stopping an artist from getting a publishing company (for commercial deals), and joining a performing right society like BMI, ASCAP, etc... which takes care of licensing and such for radio.

I think the problem their is the cumbersome nature of going to individual artists and negotiating terms. The benefit of dealing with an agency is it speeds up the process and makes it easier to manage.

Damn you, Cambridge Brewing Company!

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