Based on what I understand of CC licenses I’ve gotta agree with Ron here and have thought the same myself.

Since CC licenses cannot ever be revoked by the original author ccMixter has the legal right (and arguably has the responsibility) to keep every track ever submitted to it available for download indefinitely whether the author still wants it there or not.

It seems like the only reason to allow authors to remove their work is as a show of good will toward their wishes… yet even that still seems to undermine the permanent spirit of the CC license. It’s kinda like saying to authors, “CC licenses are permanent, but if you change your mind later, that’s cool”

Just my $0.02

The license may last for the duration of copyright, but as a practical matter, it is standard netiquette for a website to permit people to withdraw from public life, should they so choose.

It doesn’t mean the license on the work changes, but if people want to reduce their general internet profile and footprint, sites like CCMixter should not be a hard roadblock in the way of that.

Sites that don’t let you unregister come in for a lot of criticism.

As for uploads, while they are there as source, they are more than that; they’re not just there because of the license associated with them. They’re also there as a way of permitting members to participate in the community. If an upload disappears, it isn’t because CCMixter has lost the right to host the material, in other words.

I was definitely aware of the netiquette behind allowing you to do those things, and I can also understand how it would be very weird and possibly a major turn-off and criticism to say that contributors can’t delete their account or their works. That definitely makes this a more difficult issue to deal with.

But still, I can’t help but feel that allowing users to do that is a holdover from the All Rights Reserved era of the internet. I think that people who truly understand the CC principle come here knowing that participation in this community comes closely tied with waiving certain rights to your work. In particular, you have waived your distribution rights permanently and suddenly wanting them back doesn’t change that fact.

If anyone wanted to it would be well within their legal rights to create and build a wholly separate permanent and undeletable index/archive of ccM works. Then the issue would be moot, right?

Anyway, since it’s impossible to force the comprehensive removal of a CC-licensed work from the whole of the internet, it seems like a waste on ccM’s part to allow deletion. To me, reducing someone’s “internet profile” isn’t as tangible a benefit as having a permanent untouchable index and attribution tree of CC licensed works. As others have said, attribution is currency, and allowing deletion can undermine the flow of attribution.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the people that would be upset that they couldn’t remove their works don’t fully understand or agree with the CC principle in the first place. As always, I’d love to hear from people that can prove me wrong. Would you be upset if you couldn’t remove your account/songs, AB?

Quote: Since CC licenses cannot ever be revoked by the original author ccMixter has the legal right (and arguably has the responsibility)

Because CC licenses are super-copyright they apply to each copy of the music as well as the composition.

So the CC lic for each copy can not be revoked but if a user removes the upload then further copies are not under CC. If you downloaded it from ccM it has a CC lic attached to it. If you got it from somewhere else it is not under CC. (Again, this ridiculousness is inherited from the underlying copyright)

ccM has the right to continue to copy the original upload but hardly the responsibility to do so. ccM policy is to respect the artist’s wishes and remove the CC licensed copy to prevent further generating CC licensed copies - even when the artist has no idea what any of this means, which is the vast majority of the case.

Quote: fourstones
ccM has the right to continue to copy the original upload but hardly the responsibility to do so. ccM policy is to respect the artist’s wishes and remove the CC licensed copy to prevent further generating CC licensed copies - even when the artist has no idea what any of this means, which is the vast majority of the case.

This was my original idea. Remove the downloads and anything, but there should be some mechanism to prove that the download existed with the corresponding licence.

After analyzing the attribution html source, I realized there is already some meta info between ccM and creativecommons.org attribution html snipped generation. There is a base32 encoded sha1 digest hash generated from the original ccM upload included in the URN of the DIV tag. But this only proves, that the mp3 file I used is exactly the same as the one originaly uploaded to ccM.

eg:

about=”urn:sha1:QPN5J5ZKSZ5JYCSR2JNXUCJGMDKVYIWH”

Everybody who has the original uploaded mp3 could generate this hash by himself. If the hash were signed by ccM, this would be different.
So technicaly it would be possible the make a mechanism to look up in some kind of catalogue, if the work is under, which CC licence.

Of course all this stuff had to be a win-win situation for both the artist and the ones who would like to make use of what CC offers them.

But all this CC stuff is senseless and ccM broken-by-design, if I can be sued years later, because I used a song which had a ‘BY’ ccl and I can not prove, it was the case, when I downloaded it.
I am even not sure, if making paper hardcopy prints of the download page, including the sha1 hash mentioned above would be enough in a legal case..

I understand the theoretical risk you are describing, but the real world risk approaches zero. Even today, there is ample Google search evidence that a CCMixter user once going by the name of echoed widely distributed works under a CC license. Again the real world odds of a successful lawsuit are vanishingly small in this case.

I was trying to link an online video to a track by “echoed” and instead found this thread.
I feel that sites like these should retain some sort of license information about the track even if the personal information has been removed.
Because there is a real problem when 3rd parties use these tracks in their own work and there is no possiblity to prove the rights to do so. For example, I am generating a site to link videos to tracks… if the track license information is removed at a later date, then an automated system will have no choice but to remove the linked video. The reason is that there is no diffrentiation between a removed track by the artists choice and one that was removed for true copyright infringement.
What I am saying is that there is great value in retaining at least some echo of the original license, otherwise derived works become highly suspect and their usage in existing or further works is hindered.

I wanted to embed this video: https://vimeo.com/9062210. But I can no longer find “56 Messages” by Echoed.
As a result, I cannot use this video, because my automated checker will remove it… because there is no automated mechanism from verifying that this video ever existed in your system. For legal reasons, without any digital proof of licensing, the audio content has to be assumed to be copyrighted. Otherwise, I am simply trusting your word of mouth that it is CC licensed. Simply because you dont feel that I will be sued… well that is no reason to host the suspect audio… and that is not in the spirit of licensing. We are not using CC music because “we probably wont be sued”… we are using it because “we cannot be sued”.

We appreciate your efforts to be in compliance with cc-licenses. And this is an issue, particularly as other sites have become more proactive in monitoring license compliance. However, artists retain all rights to their music, including the right to remove it from the site. If an artist deletes his/her profile or any material from the site, that is the artist’s perogative, and an indication that s/he no longer wishes to share their material via ccMixter (even though the license persists as noted above). While ccMixter hosts cc-licensed tracks for remix and reuse, we do not administrate the licenses of the individual tracks. As the nature of reuse has evolved, we may need to look at this particular issue more closely.