In which I become a copyright nanny
I’m an admitted NPR junkie. I will listen to just about anything on the local station, although the quasi-religiosity of A Prairie Home Companion is starting to wear on me quite a bit. My favorite show, however, is This American Life. It’s pretty much a straight human interest show, with several stories each week based around some common theme.
This week’s episode, #352, was a bit different in that the entire episode concerned a single story; that of a kidnapping from 1912. I don’t consider it one of their stronger episodes (the story itself didn’t interest me that much), but what did interest me was their choice for some of the music.
You see, I recognized it, because I had just bought the album - it was off of the NIN Ghosts set that I blogged about last week. Now, I’m not 100% familiar with how these things work, but I do know that the album is governed by a Creative Commons BY NC SA license, which in plain English means that the work must be attributed, used non-commercially, and any derivatives must also use the same license. This American Life, to the best of my knowledge, did not comply with these restrictions.
They don’t attribute the music (relying on their standard tagline: “Musical help this week provided by [staffers]“). It’s a “commercial” work (debatably, considering it’s NPR), and although I’m not sure of what copyright the show employs, I doubts that it’s the CC-BY-NC-SA variety.
There are rules governing the usage of music in radio and advertising (a Google search turned up this book result). The crux of the matter as it relates to the album is whether or not the radio show is a derivative work of the music. What is interesting to me are the implications of the Creative Commons license/freedom of the original music and the interplay with the rules governing its use as music on a radio show. Because the license permits remixes into an audio track, presumably this also includes something like a radio show. This would seem to indicate (to me) that the show should then also be bound by the CC-BY-NC-SA license. If, on the other hand, the producers of This American Life licensed the recording in the standard way for radio show music, then the issue isn’t relavant and I’m writing this all for nothing.
To me, the non-commercial section of the license is also critical. If indeed the show producers licensed the music through the typical channels and then incorporated it into a commercial work, does that place their use of the album under a completely different copyright scheme? Once NIN has released it under a CC license, are they allowed to selectively permit people to use their product in ways which do not adhere to the license?
All of these things will become more important as more and more artists release their work in a similar manner. It may seem like pedantic nitpicking now, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t matter down the line.
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
[...] But this week’s show (Mistakes Were Made, episode #354) did include an attribution of their use of NIN’s music from Ghosts, an issue I wrote about some time back. [...]