« New Email Scam Claims to Help Bridge the Digital Divide | Main | Digital Divide 101 With Amanda Congdon »
September 28, 2006
A New Idea: A Creative Commons RevShare License
Last week in Cambridge I got to see some great presentations at the WGBH open content conference, including online copyright gurus Jamie Boyle and Eric Salzman, both of whom are board members of Creative Commons. One of them - I think it was Eric - invited participants to suggest new types of licenses that Creative Commons could develop.
Later that night, I got together with Steve Garfield for a couple of beers and talked with him about the conference. When I mentioned the Creative Commons bit, he immediately pitched his grand idea for a new Creative Commons license - a "50-50 license" - which he discussed publicly yesterday on his blog. Steve uses the attribution noncommercial license, but he wants to take it a step further and allow him to forge revenue-sharing relationships with other parties:
If people want to use my work for commercial purposes they can contact me and we can work something out. I'm pretty much ok with a 50/50 split of revenue if someone wants to use my content.I am proposing a new CC license that encompases this idea.
The same Non Commercial license with a 50/50 add on, so if someone wants to use my work for a commercial purpose they can, as long as they split the profits with me 50/50.
I don't want to deal with long contracts. Just let me know you want to use my work and split the profits with me 50/50.
I'm really intrigued by this idea, but I'd take it a step further. The notion of splitting revenues 50-50 is fine for plenty of bloggers and content producers, but not everyone wants a revenue sharing model in which the splits are done evenly. Some people may insist that they get a 70-30 split, while others may feel they'll get more offers if they ask for only 10 or 20 percent of the revenue. Just like every blogger has a different notion of how they're content gets used, there's no telling how many different ways someone would want to divvy up the proceeds.
Actually, that's not true. There are a 100 different ways a revenue split could happen if you think about it: a 1-99 split, a 2-98 split, and so on. And it wouldn't make sense for Creative Commons to create 100 different licenses for this purpose. So I would modify Steve's idea: rather than propose a 50-50 license, I'd call it the NonCommercial-Attribute RevShare License.
The first two parts of the license would be the same as always. Anyone could use the specified content for noncommercial purposes as long as they attribute me, and there's no need to ask permission to do that. But if you want to use the content for commercial gain, you'd have to accept a revenue sharing agreement with me. So every time you make money on derivative works that incorporate my content, I'd receive and agreed-upon share of the revenue.
So how would you express your desired split? Through metadata, of course. Creative Commons licenses are actually three licenses: a simple, easy to understand deed that explains your rights and responsibilities; a lawyerly contract that spells it out for the suits; and machine-readable metadata that gets embedded with your content. For example, when I created my blog, I added the metadata for the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, my particular license of choice. All I had to do was go to the Creative Commons website and fill out a form that asked me simple questions about how I want my content to be used. My answers to these questions generate the metadata that gets inserted onto my blog. Once I'd done that, search engines could pick up the metadata, allowing people to search for content that meets their particular needs. The metadata essentially tells the search engine what my licensing terms are and passes it on to interested parties conducting the search.
It seems to me that Steve's idea could be built into a new license, while allowing you to specify your revenue sharing terms while filling out the form on the Creative Commons website. So if you were happy with a 50-50 split, that's what the metadata would say. (Ideally it would also generate the appropriate CC button on your website, complete with the split numbers, like the above examples.) That way, if a person looking to license content is willing to share a certain amount of their profits with the original content producer, they could limit their search to a particular split or split range. I could see this being particularly useful when conducting CC searches on Flickr.
I could also see this leading to yet another license: the NonCommercial-Attribute-FlatRate license. Rather than requesting a revenue share, a content producer could include in their metadata a baseline flat rate for their work, in the currency of their choice. So if I think I'm a hot-shot photographer and expect good money for my picks, I could select the license and set it to say that if you want to use a pic for commercial gain, you'll have to license it from me for $1000. Or $10. Or 15 drachmas. Whatever. The amount would be determined by what you think the market would tolerate for your work. So Flickr suddenly becomes a market for amateur photographers, as well as a showcase for their work.
Interesting ideas, Steve... Thanks for getting me thinking about it. -andy
Posted by acarvin at September 28, 2006 12:31 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
