In my own experience I want to make a film, I want to make it NC-Attribution and I want to use a piece of music by a NC-Attribution composer because I’m a fan of his work and want to promote it through my work. Now the best way to promote my film is to distribute it through regular channels who will seek to make a profit on my work – I can accept this as it draws attention to my work and encourages people to source it through NC distribution channels, but legally am I allowed to given that it includes the NC-Attribution licence which I know will be broken by someone further down the distribution chain and should I be the one responsible for that breaking?

Im asking for the Creative Commons to help us define a commercial license, named the Genero license. The idea is that a licensor can state conditions for commercial use, and any distributor can use his work for commercial use, as long as he adheres to the stated business terms. We are also building a commercial ecosystem, with a registry, payment solutions and more. A video and a presentation describing the project in English the project is found here: http://www.fribit.no/prosjekter/genero (two links at the bottom)

The Genero licence text can be found here:
http://prosjekter.fribit.no/wiki/genero/Genero_Licence

It should be noted that the project has been nominated for the NUUG award (Norwegian Unix User Groups) by the leader of Electronic Frontier Norway, and that several notable “Copyleft” people has expressed interest in the project, including Matt Mason, Cory Doctorow and Brett Gaylor. I hope that you will assist us in our endeavours to promote free culture.

Anyone can register at http://prosjekter.fribit.no project site and start editing.

To those that have mentioned exclusions from a free licence the freedom to make commercials and promotional use, we have done so. However for non-commercial promotional use, we cannot exclude these freedoms as they are part of the CC-NC rights. I also believe such a restriction would turn alot of people, such as our own NPO, into criminals as they use song snippets in small videos and one has to be careful.

The licence and the provided ecosystem should provide sufficient incentive to employ the Genero license, but not more. It is not about equity, it is about maximising access and promoting derivative works.

As a minimum, I’d like a CC license that can exclude any of the following uses:

advertising use
editorial use by a media organization
non-profit promotional use

This seems easy to implement and use, in turn for a lot more control.

Down the road, I hope CC will integrate with the very fine license control developed for PLUS (the Picture Licensing Universal System, http://www.useplus.com). This would give visual media makers heaps more freedom and comfort in sharing and protecting their work.

Thank you 🙂
Djuna

I appreciate the logic of your critique of ownership. Could you explain why you think this critique favors a narrow definition of noncommercial use?

The idea is predicated on an concept of the self as an independent being, unsupported by the larger, collective consciousness or culture of ideas. The assumption behind intellectual property relies on a model of consciousness that is based on the Cartesian theater, not one rooted in modern cognitive science. The mind is an ecosystem of ideas, not one’s personal factory. We must embrace our true nature and release ourselves from the bondage of intellectual property.

Is a kid on YouTube strumming a Rolling Stones song doing something “wrong”, or is he participating validly in his own cultural heritage? Where is folk music, where songs are learned, modified, and passed on to others, now that intellectual property has destroyed it? Where has our culture-as-mind gone, now that it cannot communicate freely with itself?

Further, people only make money in one of two ways: labor or ownership. I think it’s perfectly valid to make money from one’s labor, but making money from ownership is really just like a landlord making a living off of other people’s labor, just because the law says he can. If the law wasn’t there, no one would pay rent. Maintaining a building would become a service, where a person would make money from labor. The analogy can easily be made with software.

For these reasons, I hope the Creative Commons community will favor the most narrow of definitions for noncommercial use, and push forward toward freedom of information and ideas.