Online music distribution companies may not want Creative Commons music | Hacker News Reader

Online music distribution companies may not want Creative Commons music

jelsonic.com

149 pointsmynjin64 comments

Licensing something as free and then going around and making backroom deals with platform holders so it cannot freely be used is misleading and unethical. If I use CC-BY music in a game I make, I don't want to discover after the fact that you will insert ads in my YouTube trailer.

I don't entirely get the OP, if it is CC-BY then I think you could add ads to your trailer and collect money on his music. Perhaps he chose the wrong license..

If it is CC-BY-NC then he should be able to prevent you from adding ads in combination with his music (though youtube can't settle whether the larger point of the video is commercial), but he doesn't have any rights to add ads nor should youtube act as a music agent to broker deals with video producers as he asserts at the end.

> If it is CC-BY-NC then he should be able to prevent you from adding ads in combination with his music

I would recommend anybody not to license in a CC license that includes "NC" as long it is not clearly defined what you mean by "commercial".

- Is using the music in a private YouTube video commercial (probably not)?

- Is using the music in a private YouTube video that, say, some 3D-Designer rendered for a classroom project commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer rendered for a classroom project but with the potential of showing his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer rendered for some funny private side project with the potential of showing his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is using the music in a YouTube video that some 3D-Designer released for free to show his skills to potential employers commercial?

- Is enabling ads on such YouTube videos commercial? What if you enable ads because you had costs?

- Is using the music in an advertising video that is distributed only freely commercial (rather yes)?

- Is using the music in a commercial film commercial (clearly yes)?

If you say something is commercial if you get paid for it, what other types of compensation makes it commercial/non-commercial: YouTube clicks, Facebook likes, Bitcoins (when they had no value), attention for other (advertized) videos in your YouTube channel, awareness among potential employers?

These are all reasons not to republish -NC- material, they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

Maybe you have less uptake from people in the grey areas and less spread through for profit use. Looking at OSS today, maybe that is what you want.

Disagree. There are philosophical and practical reasons to argue against copyleft licenses in favor of more permissive licenses. [ADDED: or vice versa.] But there's not a lot of debate about what copyleft means (outside of some corner cases relating to linking and interfaces).

The issue with NC isn't so much around the fact that it prohibits commercial use--though in the views of some that makes it a non-free license and therefore something to avoid for that reason alone--but that defining what constitutes commercial use in the general case is essentially impossible and very much in the eyes of the beholder.

GPL2's single work issue may be a better example of ambiguosness, but dual licensing w/GPL3 is complex enough to collect from commercial licensees. Enterprises often buy the paid license because it is too hard for them to evaluate whether they will manage compliance over time.

Such a method seems quite typical to protect ones work while sharing it with end users and seems to be what the OP expected from using CC.

I don't like the state of NC, but the point of copyleft is harvesting the irony that licensors get to state the terms and aren't particularly penalized for much of anything they do wrong (their unenforceable clauses are simply ignored). So why not take NC if you want CC with a commercial chilling effect? You don't have to sue anyone, yet that chill is still there. A resolution in one US court wont even change that chill much.

> they are no more convincing reasons not to use it to license as the arguments against GPL3.

The GPLv3 defines rather exactly what is allowed and what is not. That's what a license is for: defining exactly what is allowed and what isn't (which does not contradict that there are purposes for which the GPLv3 is suitable and ones for which it is not). NC for Non-Commercial in Creative Commons on the other hand is some wishy-washy term that does not clearly define where the boundary between commercial and non-commercial is.

I've been wrestling with these issues this morning, because I'm launching a podcast soon that might, sometime down the line, be big enough where ads to defray the cost of operating it makes sense. And whether that makes pre-advertising content commercial is an open question. So while I've browsed Free Music Archive, to be safe, I'm omitting anything NC from my searches.

While it is a grey area, its not that untested. The tax office is a good proxy to define commercial vs non-commercial, and there should be plenty of precedence for different cases. In cases where the tax office don't consider something as commercial/for-profit/done under compensation and do not tax them as such, the copyright owner has a much weaker case to argue commercial activity.

In the 3D-Designer examples above, could you define what taxes everyone involved is paying? I rather sure that no person has every paid taxes for the production of their own CV, unless they create a sole proprietorship, in which case its very likely that they are doing something commercial.

> what other types of compensation makes it commercial/non-commercial

The Swedish tax office define income as work done under compensation. Gifts, in contrast, is valuables given with no expectation of compensation. Income is taxed, gifts are not. In your list, YouTube clicks, Facebook likes, attention and awareness is not taxed as income. Bitcoins were not taxes either when they had no value, but are now when given as form of compensation.

> While it is a grey area, its not that untested. The tax office is a good proxy to define commercial vs non-commercial, and there should be plenty of precedence for different cases. In cases where the tax office don't consider something as commercial/for-profit/done under compensation and do not tax them as such, the copyright owner has a much weaker case to argue commercial activity.

At least for German websites you have to add an imprint (Impressumspflicht - there is no proper English translation of this that I know of since this is a concept that to my knowledge only exists in Germany). What content this has to contain depends on whether the website is to considered as commercial or not. What remains to be said is obvious: There are court decisions that say that there are completely different criteria for a website to be commercial (in the sense of the content of the imprint) than the criteria tax authorities apply.

My buddy Ryno - http://rynothebearded.com/ has a weekly podcast that focuses on music under a CC license. There are many great tunes available free of charge, and it's very strange that music falling under this license doesn't get more traction.

Thanks for sharing. The music presented is really good.

While we are sharing CC Music have a look at

http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filt...

if your tastes extend to classical. Classical artists have it easier as they can release a sound recording of a particular performance under the CC licence and then release another recording commercially. Leon Fleisher springs to mind.

Why is that idea limited to Classical artists?

Because the composer/artist has to be dead for many years for the copyright to expire (in the United states 70 years after the death; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries...).

It isn't, forgive my clumsy writing.

I think I wrote that because classical artists think in terms of performances of a score, and I perceive that pop/rock musicians think in terms of tunes that they have composed.

An excellent podcast! Really highlights the number and diversity of indie artists distributing their works under the CC license.

I don't think it's strange, really. Music is generally publicised by large labels on purpose and at great expense. It would be incredibly rare for an unsigned (not to mention a CC no one is getting paid for) track to get on the A playlist of a national radio station without someone actively pushing it with all the usual PR that comes with a record release.

Thanks for the link.

This is a great podcast and they have featured our music a number of times!

Surely part of the problem is that content-id is a bit far-reaching for CC-licensed content? That is, as my understanding goes: if I release music under CC then you use that music, per its license, to make a derived work and stick it on YT, now I get paid for (and get to stick adverts on) your fully-licensed work! That seems a bit unfair.

So I can see that there would be benefit to a creator being able to monetise their own works on YT, but surely there needs to be a mechanism in place to protect legitimate licensees from an over-reaching licensing grab? And at the moment it seems like that mechanism is just not letting people into the monetisation system at all.

Often the people monetizing the CC licensed stuff aren't even the real owners. I've heard of quite a few people whose own work got monetized without their consent.

There are NC Creative Commons licenses that would be reasonably monetizable on YouTube, though. (But it would require a human to actually figure out if it's a commercial work.)

Huh. I run a Creative Commons record label - http://recordsonribs.com - we distribute our music through an online distributor and have never even had a hint of a problem with it. We use CC SA-NC. This for us is a pragmatic question of distribution, making sure the music is out there and available to people who might want to listen, rather than an attempt to monetize. I can tell you know, the money received from streaming services is so unbelievably low that is most is either insulting to artists to redistribute to them or only covers operational costs (and then barely covers them). We are talking in the pennies here.

Yes, the NC part is important here. I don't understand this author's complaint -- if they released it without the NC, it is definitely permissible for other people to monetize their work, and Content ID would be inappropriate!

This post seems pretty confused to me. The idea is that you tell YouTube "I own this, people can't use it without my permission, but I'm ok with it as long as you give me a cut of the ad revenue". But with CC-licensed music you have already given people that permission.

It sounds like the author wants to give people the right to use their music freely anywhere but YouTube, which CC and YouTube understandably don't support.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open source software that doesn't have anything to do with YouTube.

> But with CC-licensed music you have already given people that permission.

That's literally the opposite of true with -nc.

Let's take a specific scenario:

* Person A composes some music, releases it as CC-NC

* Person B uses that music as the background to a home video, uploads it to youtube

It seems like B is following the CC-NC license? So then A goes to YouTube and, via Content ID, says "I own the music B used in their video, they didn't have permission to use my music, but I'm willing to let them use it if you put ads on their video and give me a cut".

(Again, I do work for Google, on unrelated stuff.)

Person B in that case would be following the license, yes. Person C uses it as background music for an advertisement on YouTube in contravention of the license. That's the problem.

I was considering releasing some music under the CC SA-NC for exactly this purpose. I want people to share it, but I don't want it expoited without permission (which I'd gladly give, I just want to know by who).

To avoid the distribution issue, is it possible to use a CC licence for music downloaded from your website, while using a RR licence when providing to the distributors? (On the same song).

Any reason why the licence can't be dependent on the distribution channel?

If you own the material, you can choose as many different licenses as you want, for any reason you want. Some distributors may not be happy about this, though.

Or release a slightly different version over the distribution channels so two distinct works?

Didn't think of that, great idea. The "Spotify mix", "YouTube mix"... A new licence for every channel.

Could this also get around channels demanding "exclusives"

The problem isn't a distribution issue, the problem is that he wants to be able to tell other people that they're allowed to use his music for free, then turn around and tell YouTube that they need to redirect all the ad revenue from videos using it into his pockets as payment for using it, adding ads if necessary. That's a sleazy, dishonest thing to do. (Even for CC-BY-NC as you're adding ads to non-monetized videos against the creator's wishes - and possibly in violation of the license of other elements of the video.) Also, what matters to the distributors is whether any of the music was ever released under Creative Commons. Releasing a slightly different version probably won't help either for this reason.

I believe this is called "colored bits" if you would like to read more

> I want people to share it, but I don't want it expoited without permission (which I'd gladly give, I just want to know by who).

The purpose of Creative Commons licenses is that people know what they are allowed to do - exactly so that they don't have to go to the tedious process of asking each artist for permission.

Actually I think this just stems from simple economics.

Monetization under online content-ID schemes (including relatedly serving takedowns under DCMA where required) all require the content usage rights to unambiguously be established AND verifiable in an automated fashion. Before an ad can be placed on a piece of content or served a DCMA takedown, the right to do so needs to be veirfied (eg. DCMA requires "good faith effort"), or they may get conter-sued.

With normal licenced content, that is easy to determine in an automated fashion - audio signatures will identify the potentially infringing content & then possibly some algorithms will check for fair-use - eg. length of the original song used, audio quality to eg. indicate it it's a production video or you recording your kid dancing, maybe even a human in the loop at the very end.

With CC licensed content, every piece of potentially infriging content needs to be human verified for usage rights & even then it may not be clear quickly. It is too expensive to hire an army of humans - so you would not support it at all.

Cc is the open source of creation. I'm fascinated by the power of open source. capitalism pushed to its extream is harmful to humanity. Just look at junk food to convince yourself if you aren't yet. By its incremental enhancement, it leads to exponential growth. It is slow in the start because incremental steps are small, but it leads to a tsunami.

I believe we are on the verge to see a fundamental change in the way the worlds economy is working. This may still take 100 years, but capitalism is doomed because it leads to unstable economical states and it's harmful for humanity (e.g speculation on food).

Lets keep pushing on the snowball and extend that model to other domains. I think that scientists pioneered that model, hence the exponential scientific progress.

It seems you are implying that food which people like to eat (junk food) wouldn't be created in an 'open source' economy. Why?

Because in an open source environment the quality of the product is not defined by its commercial success but rather by the fun to create and share it. Therefore it is more in line with its intrinsic quality.

Therefore it is more in line with its intrinsic quality.

What is this intrinsic quality, and why does it correlate better with the fun during creation than with the decision by people to buy it?

It's just "quality", and while it may be difficult to say whether it correlates better with the fun during creation than with sellability, the important thing is that quality doesn't correlated with sellability very much. There are way too many other inputs that influence whether or not people will buy something - like marketing, economies of scale and access to distribution.

(Though I'm pretty sure that this hypothetical Open Source McDonald's would exist. It, and other fast food joints, solve a legitimate consumer problem - getting hot and actually tasty food quickly.)

That is not what I wrote, but it's an intresting question. It probably would but not to the actual extend US is currently facing.

Let's face it. Looking at what happens in science, we see that there is junk science and there are cheaters. So this would probably still exit in a pure open source economy. However, the incentive to create junk things just for the profit would be much smaller. The main reason, in my opinion, is because the reward of junk food creation is unrelated to its added value to humanity. With open source, the succes is more strongly related to the real added value of the product.

Note that the apparent success of junk food is not only due to people liking them. It's also because of strong marketing efforts, manipulating health tests and reports and organisations that should establish health rules, etc. It's also difficult to find healthy food because they saturate the market with it which leaves hardly any room for healthy food.

its ok as long as people eat it because they like it... it gets worse when people resort to junk food because they cant afford fresh vegetables, and that is the sad reality for a lot of people as of today

>"it gets worse when people resort to junk food because they cant afford fresh vegetables, and that is the sad reality for a lot of people as of today"

I don't think it's the cost of the food/ingredients that get's people to eat junk/fast-food. Maybe when it comes to stuff such as sugary-drinks, yes. But for food, it's often the convenience that trumps the cost. I'd say that it's actually cheaper to buy fresh ingredients, and cook it yourself, than it is to go out and binge on fast-food.

It I'm to believe what I read on-line (which is a dubious proposition), it depends on the place. I hear that in the US, McDonald's is actually cheaper than healthy food, especially if you count calories and nutritional elements per dollar spent. In most other places around the world, this definitely isn't the case.

That said, fast food solves an important need, IMO. It's usually a very tasty hot meal you can get quickly. Which is exactly what I want every time except when I'm taking my SO for a romantic evening.

It is situationally true in the US. Inner city people generally have less access to cheap produce. People who have cars and access to the capability to buy in bulk at places like BJs or Sams also have access to cheaper food, so perversely the poorest end up buying more of their food from small shops that charge more.

Billions of dollars is spent on advertising to get children addicted to sugar and make them lifelong junk food consumers. Who would pay for that in the open source economy?

Are you implying that people wouldn't enjoy the taste of sugar, salt, and fat (key components of any good junk food) without advertising?

>capitalism pushed to its extream is harmful to humanity. Just look at junk food to convince yourself if you aren't yet.

I've always seen McDonald's regarded as one of the heralds of capitalism, and I still can't find out why.

People like conflating "capitalism" with "consumerism" when it's convenient.

bandcamp is great for CC-licensing music. great for everything else, too, but that's a digression.

https://creativecommons.org/2009/01/21/bandcamp-integrates-c...

I kind of hope YouTube gets mad and tells those distros to eat shit.

Aside from rights management do these "distros" do ANYTHING anymore? And they are too lazy to do any rights management work that YouTube isn't performing semi- or fully-automatically?

YouTube should not allow them to simply be gate keepers.

> Aside from rights management do these "distros" do ANYTHING anymore?

Yes - getting physical media manufactured and distributed worldwide, promotion, and organizing world tours. All that needs massive financial firepower, you're not going to get e.g. prime-time TV ad spots as an indie label.

I expect YouTube is the one imposing these requirements on the distributors. Licensing your content under the Creative Commons, then going around and telling YouTube that anyone who uses it is infringing your copyright and they need to pay you to keep it up is dishonest and damaging to the YouYube ecosystem as a whole.

As someone who isn't at all familiar with music distribution, is YouTube really the best way for indie artists to distribute, and monetise, their music? The audio quality seems a lot lower compared to Spotify, and I don't really want to waste bandwidth on a video just to listen to music while I'm working. On the other hand I've noticed some mainstream music is blocked for me on Spotify, but available on YouTube.

I don't know about monetization, but for distribution, youtube has a huge audience. A lot of people just listen to music on youtube because it's free and accessible. So I think it's fair to say you can have great reach on youtube. At the same time, I don't know about discoverability; if you're a small artist (nobody heard of you), your video is going to have very few views, and it's unlikely to be recommended for random people listening to popular music. I don't know if other services fare any better in this regard though.

Bandwidth isn't a consideration for most people as long as it just works, and quality is good enough.

bandwidth is not a problem as long as your vid is just a still image

Additionally, if you use youtube-dl[1], you can oftentimes simply download the audio component of the video without ever touching the video.

The only problem with music on youtube is the variability of the quality and the ability to find good-quality versions of the songs you want.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl

Well keyframes are a thing and it's likely that the still image is going to be encoded a few hundred times on an average length song. Especially in a HD video (which is what you want as the audio bitrate grows along with it) the video part could be massive compared to the actual music.

Soundcloud.

Cc its really pretty nuanced you can have tunes you give away for free for people to enjoy but a commercial company would have to license it to use it in their film. I think CC Music is the future, not these crummy middle men services. Think about it, if you band is able to get shows where you have a $4,000 minimum per night off of "giving away" your music then you've won without having to sell a single song.

Note that your first sentence does not apply to all Creative Commons licenses, only to the ones with the NC clause.

>only to the ones with the NC clause

Which have significant problems. One of the smartest aspects of modern open source software licenses that's allowed them to become really widespread is that there's very little restriction by usage (e.g. only for educational use).

There have been attempts to better define NC in the context of Creative Commons probably going back a decade. But, in addition to the fact that it makes it a non-free license under OSI guidelines, it's really hard. The problem is that you either create hard and fast rules based on non-profits under US tax code or whatever (which allows some very large and potentially controversial orgs to use non-commercially) or you make essentially all non-trivial uses commercial. (Amazon referral links on your blog? Commercial.)

My personal belief is that CC should just eliminate ND and NC. ND prohibits remixing which was one of the rallying points around CC in the first place. And NC is essentially a feel good license that lets you be warm and fuzzy about contributing to the commons--while trying to make sure no one can make money from your work.

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