Music Week Blasts CC and Magnatune

Music Week, a music-industry magazine based in the UK, ran a very negative story today about the Creative Commons. Magnatune is briefly referred to in it:

It is feared by some in the music business that some musicians and songwriters will unwittingly turn to CC when it is launched here: a web-based record label, Magnatune, has already been set up based on CC principles and David Byrne and The Beastie Boys have already been featured on a CC compilation album.

It seems that this article is in response to a seminar at MIDEM, a music industry trade show in Cannes, France that Magnatune exhibited at last year (we didn't exhibit there this year). The article seems to confuse a Creative Commons license with "public domain", which are very different things, but is interesting to read as a knee-jerk reaction.

Needless to say, I received a very different reaction during a panel discussion I participated in today at Stanford University, with Lessig, two lawyers and the CC's Glenn Otis Brown. http://www.stanford.edu/group/SESLA/

Below is the complete article text:

CC creates industry concern The Music business is casting a wary eye over over the imminent arrival in the UK of a new license scheme for creators.

The Creative Commons (CC) license, which has roots in the US philanthropic and academic community, is designed to enable artists, film makers, writers,programmers and others gain maximum exposure for their work without users having to obtain the time-consuming permissions that normal copyright requires.

CC, which was the subject of a seminar at Midem, eminates from the US's prestigious Stanford Law School, which issued it first licenses in the US in 2002; a draft license has been drawn up by the University of Oxford's media and law department ready for it to be launched in the UK.

It is feared by some in the music business that some musicians and songwriters will unwittingly turn to CC when it is launched here: a web-based record label, Magnatune, has already been set up based on CC principles and David Byrne and The Beastie Boys have already been featured on a CC compilation album.

MPA chief executive Sarah Faulder voices concern that young acts could 'give up everything for no money and irrevocably' in their keenness to be heard. Patrick Rackow, barrister at Steeles Law, believes that the CC license is totally unnecessary . 'This is not an alternative to copyright,' he says. 'If people want to give their work away they have always been able to do that.'

Once a work has been passed into CC it an never be retrieved, which Faulder and others believe would be disastrous if a new group signed its first single away to the public domain with a CC license and then discovered it had the potential to become a worldwide hit.

British Academy of Composers and Songwriters chairman David Ferguson says that the CC model may work in the US, but European copyright law operates for the creators as much as big business.

'In certain areas like academia I think it is fine,but not in music or the audio visual world,' he says.