What is a collection?

A collection is an organized grouping of works that haven’t been adapted in its new form. An example of a collection is a public playlist of songs not licensed under the No Derivatives element that have been gathered by someone other than the original creator.

What are some licensing considerations for collections?

All CC-licensed content can be included in a publicly available collection provided that the original license applied to the work does not contain the Non-commercial element and the collection doesn’t result in generating profit. Since a collection results in a “copy” of the work being shared rather than a derivative, the ND element of CC-licenses is not prohibitive.

What is a derivative?

A derivative “is a work based on one or more pre-existing works. What constitutes an adaptation depends on applicable law, however translating a work from one language to another or creating a film version of a novel are generally considered adaptations” (“Frequently Asked Questions,” https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-an-adaptation by Creative Commons CC BY 4.0.). The level of “originality” associated with a derivative is subjective and based on the remixer’s country and copyright laws.

What are some licensing considerations?

All CC Licenses allow individuals to remix work, however if you want to share that work publicly, there are a few additional considerations. Any re-mixed work cannot contain work licensed under the CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC-ND licenses since it would violate the original license purposes of not creating an adaptation of the work.

Collection example:

Bandcamp is a service that allows users to compensate artists for their work within a listening platform. At it’s core, it’s not very different than other services that allow you listen to music, but Bandcamp is unique in that it doesn’t allow you to make a playlist of music from multiple artists (like SoundCloud of Spotify); rather it uses something called a “queue” which can play albums in a specific, suggested order. Changing the order in which users listen to a song from an album could be considered a derivative rather than an album collection.  Los Mojado’s album titled: Creative Commons is licensed under a CC-BY-SA-NC license.

Owen Lowery’s album titled “Free Music for Any Use” is made available under a CC-BY license.

By putting these album sets together on this page I’m demonstrating that these albums would be played one after another in the Bandcamp iOS app.

Creative Commons Certificate Assignment 4 by Kate Farley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://katefarley.org.