I talked about this at one point with a band named Jim's Big Ego, which had released their album They're Everywhere on CC-BY-NC. On the one hand, you want to make the radio stations and the big movies and the studio compilation albums pay royalties; on the other hand you want to let bloggers publish the songs on ad-supported blogs, and you want to let independent artists cover and remix the songs, even if they post their remixes on ad-supported YouTube channels. The exact goal of the NC attribute is peculiar to our transitional stage: it is attempting to embrace the Old Media Model for the corporations that are stuck inside it, while being free to use in the New Media Model.
> The exact goal of the NC attribute is peculiar to our transitional stage: it is attempting to embrace the Old Media Model for the corporations that are stuck inside it, while being free to use in the New Media Model.
I can't agree with that. The exact goal of the NC attribute is to make money from others making money out of your work but to let people who don't make money out of your work not have to pay.
That has nothing to do with "old media" and "new media", and is orthogonal to them.
(1) The big problem I see with that characterization is that CC-BY-NC doesn't establish any price for commercial use; it rather forbids it totally.
(2) I don't know how something can be orthogonal when it correlates strongly. The reason you are using CC-BY-NC is because you want to enable noncommercial uses, which is a major chunk of the entire new-media model of use, and a miniscule grain in the old-media model's desert.
Just to explain, because I was a bit terse above: The point of NC is that use and distribution in the world of filesharing networks, mix tapes, podcasts, independent remixers, and public social events like flash mobs -- those are explicitly allowed, because they don't make anybody any money. The point which I had trouble explaining above was that there also some for-profit uses in this category which NC-using bands would not mind, like ad-supported bloggers. In that sense, my impression of those who select NC is that they really just want to embrace the newer ways that people interact with music, without allowing the older modes of interaction to exploit it.
> The big problem I see with that characterization is that CC-BY-NC doesn't establish any price for commercial use; it rather forbids it totally.
That is not a problem at all: believe it or not, a work can be available under multiple licenses. Here's how you establish a price for commercial use: you talk to the author and you ask him if he'd consider giving you a commercial license, the you discuss the price.
> I don't know how something can be orthogonal when it correlates strongly.
Because it only correlates due to medium and publication costs.
> The point which I had trouble explaining above was that there also some for-profit uses in this category which NC-using bands would not mind, like ad-supported bloggers.
Or so you believe, that doesn't actually mean it's the case. Furthermore, and as I noted above, this is a non-issue: the ad-supported blogger can send a request to the author and get a license directly.
> In that sense, my impression of those who select NC is that they really just want to embrace the newer ways that people interact with music, without allowing the older modes of interaction to exploit it.
