I have always had an unspecified strange feeling about Tribe of Noise. Tribe of Noise is an Amsterdam-based online music platform that allows musicians to upload and share their work as long as they agree to make it available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). Simply put this license allows everybody to redistribute the songs on the platform, make remixes of them and redistribute these remixes under the same licensing terms. In all cases credit needs to be given to the original artist(s). It explicitly allows for commercial (re)use of the licensed works and it is one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses (and the license that has recently been chosen by a huge majority of wikipedia editors to apply to all text on wikipedia). I like this license.
I am writing this (rather long) text because I have come to the conclusion that the way Tribe of Noise uses this license is confusing to people contributing to the platform and can in the end be harmfull for the reputation of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license and the Creative Commons licensing model as a whole.
Even though i have endorsed Tribe of Noise back when it was launched (something i should have never done and which i am obviously retracting by writing this) the exclusive choice for the CC-BY-SA license made by Tribe of Noise never felt in line with the way the Tribe of Noise (TON) chooses to present itself: It is an aggressive start-up and the founder (and selfdeclared ‘Chief of Noise’) Hessel van Oorschot aggressively markets it as such. They have been quite successful in getting media attention and have known to attract a substantial number of artists to their platform (at the time of writing there are 5878 members). The platform is promoted to artists as a way to get in contact with commercial users of music.
I have met with Hessel on a number of times in the past and among others i have invited him to the ‘Filesharing: Up or Down?‘ discussion that i organized at de Balie in Amsterdam in the wake of the Pirate Bay trail and the publication of the Ups and Downs study on the economic impacts of file sharing. That evening Hessel explained that one of the components of the Tribe of Noise business model is to license (for a fee one assumes) the music repertoire posted to Tribe of Noise to video hosting services so that they can use it in services like youtube’s audio-swap or offer the music to video makers that are looking for copyright un-encumbered music tracks to use in their videos.
However, such a business model is rather difficult to carry out based on the rights granted by the CC-BY-SA license. One of the key features of this license is that it requires derivative works of the original works to be licensed under the CC-BY-SA license as well (the share alike mechanism). This means, that every time a work licensed under a BY-SA license is integrated into another work (or the other way around) the resulting work needs to be distributed under a the CC-BY-SA license as well. If a video maker uses a short snippet of CC-BY-SA licensed music in a (long) video that is otherwise completely made by herself she needs to release the entire video under the CC-BY-SA license or she is in breach of the license (and thus infringing on the copyright of the musician in question). This means that CC-BY-SA licensed music is pretty much useless for purposes like sound-swap unless the provider of the service intends to force the video makers to use a CC-BY-SA license themselves.
Given this Tribe of Noise probably has a hard time selling the repertoire uploaded to the platform to video hosting services (at least as as long as you assume that they would base these transactions on the CC-BY-SA licenses granted by their uploaders).
[…] The runner up, Tribe of Noise, was also given an honorary mention for their brilliant concept of music library in which creative commons licence (sic!) could be used for commercial purposes.
The fluffy language in the conference summary triggered my interest. What exactly is so brilliant about Tribe of Noise’s concept? Given the characteristics of the CC-BY-SA license explained above i failed to see how there could be a ‘brilliant concept of music library in which Creative Commons license could be used for commercial licenses’. Sure there are three CC licenses that allow for commercial use of the licensed works but it is hardly brilliant to allow people to upload content to your platform under one of them.
andto every user of your work on the Website the following Creative Commons license: CC 3.0 By – Share Alike.
[…] sharing music with other musicians and companies around the globe and getting more attention that is a legal challenge. But we came up with a solution so let me know how it is done on tribe of noise: Sharing music online even for commercial purposes is legal!! with help from legal advisors laywers (sic!) and creative commons!! Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Of course Tribe of Noise is free to ask their users for whatever license grants they want (and one could imagine that some artists do not object to give away the right to commercial use in exchange for exposure of their work on Tribe of Noise). However one would assume that a site that states ‘Tribe of Noise means music and respect!‘ openly informs its uploaders what rights they are granting to the platform in exchange for being allowed to upload a work to the platform. Hiding such information in the legalese of the Terms of Service does not really show respect for the musicians using the platform.