Sunday, January 29, 2006

Re-use looses credit?

Today I noticed something strange. I have thought about it in the past.

Credits are lost with CC licenses when stuff is re-used!

Check for example the cool song Dream-off of C.Portable.
C.Portable gives credit to TRZ.exp for using samples of Sumarezinho Underground.
That Sumarezinho Underground track uses samples of my song combis43.
C.Portable doesn't give me credit.

So in this case of re-use (2 times) the credits are lost. This doesn't feel right to me. You can imagine that when it's re-used a couple more times, it is getting even more difficult to find who are the original authors.

What if someone wants a commercial license for example? Is the original author still in the thread?

Think about someone re-using Magnatune artists, credits get lost and the song ends up being used for an HBO tv-series.

I am confused, please explain to me how this should work.

9 comments:

Gurdonark said...

Hi Marco:

I had noticed this, too, and try to remember (but don't always remember) to manually add the roots of the roots of songs.

But automatic would be cool :)

fourstones said...

You don't lose the credit, you just have to click one extra time to get to it -- we looked at lots of ways of displaying the attribution tree and in the end decided on the current model.

Some of the assumptions we based that decision on 1.5 years ago may not be true anymore... (e.g. "remix of a remxi" was VERY RARE until somewhat recently)

I guess if you're asking for a "flat view" we could consider that again.

fourstones said...

oh, and Magnatune isn't an issue because of the ShareAlike clause (which includes NonCommercial so HBO would have to go back to the root of all non-evil: john buckman)

Gurdonark said...

Victor--


I don't have the full context for addressing how things should be, so I'll ask a question instead.

Although automatic incorporation makes sense to me, I assume that it's no burden for the site if I just manually add the source samples for remixes when do the "I sampled this..." for a new remix, right? That way I can just manually avoid the issue to which Marco refers.

Marco Raaphorst said...

great. yes, credits should go back indeed, or else lots of musicians would not agree.

I can imagine for an update at mixter, you Victor show us some mighty fine Ajax scripting for showing the credit-list in a flexible way ;)))

Marco Raaphorst said...

hey Victor, you say:

'"remix of a remxi" was VERY RARE until somewhat recently'

that only happens to really great material, the classic stuff. stuff like the Mona Lisa... get it?

;p

fourstones said...

I don't think you would break the site but I personally would appreciate if you continue to use the site as it was designed, that is: you say "I Sampled This" when you ACTUALLY sampled it, not "I Sampled The Thing That This Thing Sampled..." etc.

We do not LOSE any attribution -- that would mean there's no way to get back to Macro's sample in the example above but that is not true, you can get back to him with one extra click.

So this is a display issue, not one of architecture or even attribution.

Flexibility typically comes as the cost of complexity so I want to proceed cautiously because the remix/attribution tree is quite a huge gangly jumble right now and only gets exponentially more complex every time someone mashes Kendra with J.Lang.

e.g. There's a very cool Java plugin I've seen that maps the entire tree for the whole site but we haven't figure out a way to incorporate that into the site yet.

Marco Raaphorst said...

yes, you need the S-Divah Plugin...

Gurdonark said...

I won't do manual attribution, then. But it still "sits" odd with me, when I put on my IP hat, that if someone pulls from the site for a podcast, and then someone pulls from the podcast, then the original sample provider would not get attribution. To me, the whole point is attribution, in some ways.
But I see the other side, too (a hazard of wearing the IP hat), and so I'll do it the way the site does it now.