To Licence or Not to Licence

This is another shameless re-posting of a comment I made on someone elses blog - this time tech commentator/journalist/legend Bill Thompsons.

In the post Bill talks about the various ‘post your stuff here’ sites and their licences and more specifically how many rights those licences tend to give the company over your own content.

One comment on the post suggested an Inverse Commons Licence would be a useful way of solving the problem and making things more transparent - basically sites asking for content subscribe to a creative commons for publishers style licence.

This is an interesting issue and one I’ve come across a number of times during my normal working day.

I work a lot with unsigned bands who often put stuff on My Space or You Tube and many have had fantastic opportunities including gigs and the chance to be on a compilation CD come out of it.

But a number of the bands (especially the more established) have started taking their material down because of these wide open licences sites impose - I know at least 15 groups that removed music from MySpace until the T&Cs were changed.

I completely agree with scot - we need a standard licence across all service providers and for a number of services like MySpace and YouTube this could be achieved easily by doing a Flickr and giving users the choice of assigning a Creative Commons licence to their work.

For sites like the BBC, CNN etc… the Inverse licence is probably more suitable due to the fact that the user libraries don’t exist in the same way as they do for My Space or Flickr.

If all sites that ask for submissions (that might not even be used) subscribed to a standard licence (like Creative Commons for Publishers) then it would make people feel a little more comfortable sharing their work - and this is something that media companies WILL rely on more and more.

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