"Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo" wrote in message [🔎] 20070708230238.GA6950@minaslivre.org">news:[🔎] 20070708230238.GA6950@minaslivre.org...
[...] | 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.
Same here.
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.
I agree. First of all, in the case of cc-by, the licence is explicitly royalty free.
This clause is about the right to collect the non-existant royalties. Also this only applies to forced royalties like compulsory licencing.Now, it might be that some legal system does not allow royalty free-licences.
In that case this clause can become meaningful. It is also possible thatin some legal system, while royalty-free licences are legal, there are certain activies that
require royalties regardless. In that case again, this clause is meaningful.Finally, in some countries, there are compulsory licenses, which much be made available. For example, the compulsory licensing for music in the United States. AIUI basically, the law says that if you pay a certain amount, you recive a licence to use the song. This true regardless of the wishes of the copyright holder.
This clause may be relevent in the case of a song licenced under something like CC3.0 BY-NC, and somebody choses to use the compulsory linsencing system. That clause may allow the copyright holder to collect the royalty directly, rather than having ASCAP (or whoever it is who normally collects this) take a chunk.
Regardless of all of that, I do not believe a program should be considered non-free because of messed up laws in some countries. It seems reasonable for a licence to acknowledge the possibilty of such messed up legal systems, and try minimize the damage.