Comments on: Video News

By: Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » Oops

Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » Oops — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 14:37:54 +0000

[...] 2) Kevin Gray sends me a video for “Drive” – the car commercial vibe is now in full effect. Kevin is the guy who did that Baby Got Back video I linked to earlier, featuring a lot of lady butts. As you might imagine, this one’s a little less butt-y. [...]

By: Dan S.

Dan S. — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:08:17 +0000

CC for the JC originals is truly awesome. I forgot to mention that.

By: JC

JC — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:07:07 +0000

Dan: an excellent point. Now I am embarassed that I used this example to push my creative commons agenda, because as you point out, certainly the original BGB is not creative commons, so I can’t just stamp it that way just because I want to. I was excited and frothy and got ahead of myself. Oops. Sorry everyone (especially you Sir M).

By: Dan S.

Dan S. — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:39:24 +0000

As much as I love the Creative Commons movement, we should remember that someone else owns the copyright to the original song, Baby Got Back. It’s possible that Jonathan’s cover could be licensed with the original artist for distribution under the full terms of a CC license, but I assume it isn’t. I expect that this cover, and perhaps a derivative video, will probably fly under the radar of a copyright challenge, but I don’t think we can talk about licensing the cover without taking the original copyright holder into account.

Certainly, I take Jonathan’s point to be that others have his permission to make derivative works of his version of this recording, which is great. I’m just not sure it’s safe to assume the CC license for the recording has complete legal merit without documentation that it is agreed to by *every* copyright holder. (IANAL.)

But I love the cover, and I hope it brings Jonathan’s works the attention they deserve. I bought both albums based on BGB’s appearance in the Coverville top 50 and subsequent exposure to tracks on this site. (Yay!)

(Coverville *is* licensed to play Jonathan’s cover of BGB via an ASCAP umbrella license. I’m really not sure, and I shouldn’t speculate, but I believe if Sir Mix got his panties in a bunch, so to speak, J may be forced to take the MP3 off the site, but Coverville could still keep the show in which it appears in his archives.)

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:41:40 +0000

You say you and Hodgman are podcasting? Should we be expecting a new Little Gray Books (I love it!)? Because that is great, and it might grab some extra publicity for you and him.

By: The Almighty Charles

The Almighty Charles — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 04:09:57 +0000

It is a shame the Podsafe vid was never made. Cool pics. You, sir, are debonair as construction paper.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:18:42 +0000

According to:

http://creativecommons.org/faq#How_do_I_properly_attribute_a_Creative_Commons_licensed_work?

the proper form of attribution is:

(1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work;
(2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify;
(3) the title of the Work; and
(4) the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the author and/or licensor.

I imagine that in the absence of a specification, just the author’s name would satisfy requirement #2.

If you want “JoCo”, you should specify it somewhere.

By: JC

JC — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 15:58:00 +0000

Yes, regarding attribution: I think in most cases people usually just indicate somewhere the orignal author and provide a URL back to the original work, though the FAQ on creativecommons.org has more detail. I’m not sure what “in the manner specified” refers to, unless maybe I can require everyone to call me JoCo (which maybe is not a bad idea).

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 11:25:24 +0000

CC licensing is one of the things that just seems so radical in our era of the Gestapo-type attitude that other licensing agencies are taking: all the permission-getting is already taken care of.

You mentioned earlier about how “easy” it was to put the Flickr video together because folks had applied a CC license to their photos.

I also liked how you put in the credits the URLs of the original photos as a way of attribution.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 05:22:26 +0000

Quick question regarding the CC license…. According to the terms of the licence, one may make derivative works provided that, among other things:

“You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor”

I couldn’t find any mention of this on your site, so… what exactly is the manner in which you would like derivitave works attributed to you?