A painting of me

Crystal Castles' Creative Commons Controversy. ⇒

   6 May 2008, early morning

I'm not a big fan of Creative Commons. I think most of the time you are better off just asking people to contact you if they want to use your work.

This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.

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Comments

  1. CC licensing is great. If you go with just asking people if you can use their work, you are likely to run into legal problems down the line. Also, what about when the original author is no longer around?

    Without a CC license, you don’t have a legal basis for the permissions, and therefore there are no restrictions on use, no need for attribution, original author could want to take away permission, etc.

    The person that wrote that article does not have a very good idea of how CC licenses work. There are different components to CC licenses, including derivative works and for profit use.

    by juan on May 6 2008, 9:38 am   #

  2. Yeah, I left a comment saying as much. They seem to have done little to know research before writing the article.

    I don’t get what you’re saying in the second paragraph at all.

    by ramanan on May 6 2008, 10:49 am   #

  3. just saying that if i say to you “sure, you can use my song/paper/artwork”, it is unclear what this really means.

    i.e. in that statement, it is not clear if i can use it for whatever i want, if i have to attribute you in my work, if i can profit from y derived work, etc.

    CC licensing gives a legal basis for your “yes, its OK for you to use it”

    by juan on May 6 2008, 12:43 pm   #

  4. Ah, makes sense. Anyway, as the comments point out, these guys haven’t released their songs under the same license as Lo-bat’s so they are violating the license that way as well. What is more awesome is that this is the same band that stole some artists drawing of Madonna beat up and used it for their t-shirts and album cover art. (I linked to the Torontoist article a while back.) The artist actually has a whole category on his blog dedicated to bitching about the band.

    by ramanan on May 6 2008, 2:26 pm   #

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