Freesound Forums

Hello everybody,

I'm struggling with this part of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license:

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Example:

A storyteller (Mr. S) is recording his own narratives / stories. He adds sound effects (like footsteps, wind, rain) to the recorded audio files. These sound effects are licensed under the CC BY license. The original sound effects are modified by Mr. S to fit to his recording.

Mr. S has a website where registered, paying users can listen online to his stories. So he is selling the access to the audio stream of his stories - he gives all the required attribution of the CC BY license to the creators of the sound effects.

But, his own legal terms do not grant any rights to the listeners (the paying users) to share or sell his audio files, nor to adopt or remix them or use them in any other way except to listen to them.

Is that allowed by the CC BY license?

I think it is, but what does the quoted part of the license mean?

Thanks a lot
Tom

webcoreit wrote:

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Is that allowed by the CC BY license?

I think it is, but what does the quoted part of the license mean?

Hi Tom.

As long as "Mr S" is abiding by the original license terms (attribution) he does not have to publish his material under a Creative Commons License. He could apply an "all rights reserved" copyright license.

This is where it gets confusing because the quoted clause applies only if you are choosing to redistribute [the sound] as is or modified versions in some sort of library or database. It can't apply to creative works made which include the original material as part of a composition, these works need a separate license and don't have to be CC. Mr S does however need to apply all relevant terms when publishing.

Take for example a documentary episode of BBC Horizon. Their programme has a standard all rights reserved copyright notice. However they have used one CCBY sound effect from Freesound.org that they have attributed correctly within the rolling credits; the DVD is on sale on Amazon. This doesn't mean they have to apply the same CC license without restrictions to their programme. You see what I mean?