The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License

[Coises]

The songs I’ve written are released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license.

I’ve done this for a simple reason. I know that the chances that my work will never be heard at all (outside of a few friends, and maybe some people on these message boards) is infinitely greater than the chance that I’ll write a song that will bring in the big bucks. The vast majority of musicians don’t hit the lottery — they earn their living like everyone else, by working their asses off day to day, playing and touring. Health, psychology and talent are all against me there: I am not, and will never be, a performer. Asking how can I make money from my compositions is just silly — it ain’t gonna happen; rather, I ask, how can I get what I write to matter at all... to be anything but musical masturbation.

By profession I was a computer programmer (I’m disabled now), and what programming I still do has led me to a great respect for the free software movement. The economy of physical objects (chairs and caviar) is not the same as the economy of ideas and innovations; we are, and will be, stuck in the new Dark Ages until we find a way to integrate the two without trying to warp the latter to make it behave like the former.

What I want to ask is mostly directed to those with some affinity for the free culture movement.

The Creative Commons Sampling Plus license still exists, but it’s no longer accessible from their License Your Work page. They don’t say they’ve discontinued or deprecated it, but something seems to have happened.

Is this license a bad choice? Should I select a different license to maximize the chances that someone else will be able to use my work?

The thing I particularly like about the Sampling Plus license that is not found in any of the core licenses is the provision that “You may not use this work to advertise for or promote anything but the work you create from it.” That is important to me. I suppose it goes against the principles of free culture, but it would piss me off if somebody found a way to use one of my songs as a background for, say, some propaganda to support the war on drugs or deny equal protection to gays. That’s a veto power I’d like to keep.

On the other hand, I hate to think that some guy who is able to get out there and play every night might run across one of my songs and want to perform it, but figure that his use is “commercial” and find the prospect of clearing the rights to be just a bit too daunting to bother. I know I’d be easy to deal with, but he doesn’t — that’s the problem with permission culture: everything becomes so intimidating that even what can be done doesn’t get done.

[Roflcopter]

It's a very good question.

My personal stance is, that big business will just do as it pleases anyway - copyrights or CC license, whatever. UNLESS you have big bucks and ditto lawyers (read: your record company) there is very little you could do against someone stealing your music - maybe go public and cause a big stink, and have some form of retribution that way. But no real protection. They will basically behave like big bullies, simply because they know they can get away with it.

On the other hand you wouldn't mind others to play your stuff.

So my take on it is, slap a CC license on it (not sure what's up with the situation on that particular one ATM, and IANAL) but I would let people just use it for gigs, whatever - unless they start making big bucks, and then hope on their decency to cough up a fair share.

Again, there is very little you can do against bigtime crooks, unless you happen to work for one of them, and can rely on their 'protection'. (Does that spell Mafia - yeah, I guess).