Zune Violates Spirit of Creative Commons Licenses

The Creative Commons licenses provide a way for content creators to allow free distribution of their work, while also protecting the works commercial value. A key concept of the licenses is that, if you decide to share your music, videos or other creations with a CC license, other people and companies will respect that decision, and not redistribute your creations with added limitations.

Microsoft’s Zune player lets users share copies of work shared with Creative Commons licenses, but places limits on how the copies are used. For example, a free podcast downloaded to a Zune would have limits placed on it when it was shared with other Zunes.
“The Zune … does not violate the letter of the CC license but it certainly violates the spirit of the license and of free culture generally,” says Creative Commons general counsel Mia Garlick. People that use Zunes to share music and videos that are freely distributed over the Internet will find that their Zune copies are crippled. The Zune only lets you use the copies for a limited time - which violates the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses.

Microsoft places the limitations on copies as a compromise with record labels concerned over the devices potential for piracy. This heavy-handed approach, though, limits the value of the Zune’s wireless features and hampers the ability of independent content creators to distribute their work.

via Wired

     

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 9:31 am and is filed under General, Making Money with Podcasts, Podcasting Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.