Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Creative Commons has announced CCPlus.

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This is not a new license, but a method of facilitation to acquire more use of a non-commercially licensed CC protected work.  In theory, the gold link would take a potential user of the work to an agreement that can be used to acquire more permissions than the standard CC/NC license permits.

Now owners of CC licensed works can make money from those works.  I don’t know this will change much for most people who create CC licensed material (I consider myself in that group), but it could lead to more traditionally copyright protected works being licensed under the Creative Commons umbrella.  Time will tell.

TechCrunch has a story where copyright law has gotten out of hand. 

A guy does a parody video using a Billy Joel tune.  When I first saw the headline I thought the musician has ordered the take down because the music is protected by copyright.
That wasn’t the case. Instead, the photographer that took this picture complained that she was not paid for her work and so the video must be taken down.

This is one of those gray areas where the use of the picture could very well be used within the rights of fair use. Fair use does not require the permission of the copyright owner, and parody is one of the permitted uses. In the case of this video, the creator of the photo wanted attribution for the photo and didn’t get it in the video. Her feelings were hurt. Unfortunately, they weren’t protected by copyright law.