By selecting any “Non-Commercial” Creative Commons licence for their work the creator reserves the right to collect royalties for all commercial uses of the work under statutory or compulsory licences. This means that it is in fact practicable for a songwriter, composer or musician to license works under a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” licence while still being entitled to collect royalties for the commercial use of that work.

In Australia (and New Zealand) the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA), like many collecting societies around the world, takes a full assignment of the member’s performing rights of all past, present and future works. By assigning the rights to the collecting society it allows more efficient administration of the royalty collection process. However, this raises compatibility issues for creators who have assigned their rights to a collecting society but then seek to license a work or works under a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” licence. In simple terms, once a person is a member of APRA, the performing right in all works is assigned to APRA and therefore the creator no longer has the right to issue any direct licences for the performance of their works.

APRA provides options for members to “opt out” completely or “licence back” individual works. For further information about APRA’s position regarding Creative Commons licences please see their statement on their website.

These options do not however provide an option which would allow the member to utilise a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” licence to license a work while still collecting royalties through APRA for the commercial use of that work. For further information about collecting societies and Creative Commons licences please see question 1.10 in the Creative Commons FAQs.

Creative Commons licences provide licensing options for artists that current APRA members are, as yet, not able to exploit without relinquishing their right to collect royalties for the commercial performance of that work. For those who are not yet familiar with Creative Commons licences, the Arts Law Centre of Australia Online has published an article by Nick Sweeney which provides a useful overview of the licensing system.

Internationally, Creative Commons is working with the international confederation of societies of authors and composers (CISAC) on the issue. Earlier this year Dutch collecting societies Buma and Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands launched a pilot project that enables members of Buma/Stemra to use the 3 non-commercial CC licenses for non-commercial distribution of their works. It also allows Dutch composers and lyricists who already use the CC NonCommercial license to join Buma/Stemra and have them collect their royalties for commercial use of their works. Plans to run a similar trial in Italy has also been announced.