Re: whichwayisup: CC-v3.0 licenses do not meet the DFSG (original) (raw)

[...] | e. For the avoidance of doubt: | | i. Non-waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those | jurisdictions in which the right to collect royalties through | any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme cannot be | waived, the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect | such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted | under this License;

This is worrying, IMHO. DFSG#1 states, in part: "The license may not require a royalty or other fee". Hence I would say that a license where the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect royalties does not meet DFSG#1. On the other hand, in a jurisdiction in which royalty collection rights cannot be waived, this issue seems to be unavoidable... How can that be worked around? Is this clause a legal no-op? But is this a freeness issue anyway? How do we deal with jurisdictions where granting some of the permissions required by the DFSG is impossible?

IANAL, IANADD, TINLA, etc.

I guess the meaning of this clause is that the Licensor will be the only one to collect such royalties. That is, nobody else will collect them. That is a plus.

Here in Brazil and I guess in many other places, there are some offices that are responsible for collecting these royalties. I don't know the details, but they seem to collect in places that publicly display or perform works, based on the number and, perhaps, the authors of the works. But I am not sure they do it nicely. It seems they may charge statically, like 2 hours of show will be about 20 songs and they charge for it, ignoring that you may have a license to publicly perform the work freely.

So, this clause would be a plus in cases like this, since the Licensor will not grant some office like this the right to collect those royalties.

I don't know if the right to collect royalties cannot be waived in Brazil, but if they can, this clause could say something like: "the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect [...], and waive it in the case it is possible/allowed."

Regards, Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo.

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