RightsAgent Commercial License

= midway between the sharing allowed by a Creative Commons license and the "all rights reserved" approach of traditional copyright

URL = http://www.rightsagent.com/

Description

"modeled after a new type of Creative Commons license called Creative Commons Plus, anyone who wants to buy the rights to re-use that content for commercial purposes can do so directly through RightsAgent, which collects a 10 percent commission. People who want to use the content for non-commercial purposes can still do so under a Creative Commons License. Neither the Creative Commons licenses nor traditional copyright, by themselves, offer this kind of flexibility. As Lessig puts it in the company’s launch announcement, “RightsAgent plugs a big hole in the world of user generated creativity, by making it simple for creators to license rights commercially with their creative work.”" (http://www.xconomy.com/2007/12/14/all-user-generated-content-doesnt-want-to-be-free-a-qa-with-cambridge-startup-rightsagent-about-its-new-approach-to-copyrighting/)

See also for another description at Mashable

Discussion

From an interview at xconomy.com:

"X: Explain how a user’s “personal feed” works on RightsAgent.

JP: First, from the perspective of the person who creates online content, it’s a single place where all of your work can be found. A lot of prominent bloggers and online creators have not just a blog, but also a Flickr feed, Amazon reviews, and videos on Revver and YouTube, and so forth. We create a single place to aggregate those works so other people can subscribe to your feed. The second thing is that it creates a trustworthy system for determining on what basis your works can be licensed. It may be that you want to give everything away, subject to a Creative Commons license. The gap that this fills for those people is that it’s a one-stop shop for all your work, and it creates a time stamp and a level of authenticity when someone licenses your work. One of the concerns that many commercial publishers have had about user-generated content is that they don’t know at what point you put a particular license on your work, and this creates a certain level of trust that you were licensing it that way at a certain time. And if you are Reuters or CNN and you want to re-use this material, it creates a greater level of certainty that the person who claims to have created this content is in fact the creator." (http://www.xconomy.com/2007/12/14/all-user-generated-content-doesnt-want-to-be-free-a-qa-with-cambridge-startup-rightsagent-about-its-new-approach-to-copyrighting/)

More Information

Interview with founders: [1]