I just got a call from Paul Jacobson (Chillibean) who has written a great post about the finest-of-fine print on the sapodcasting site that has some podcasters boycotting the competition if the rules aren't changed. The worst thing about this story is that I met with Steven Davis from Apple South Africa last year to talk about exactly this competition and he assured me that he would work with Creative Commons to ensure that podcasters knew what material was "podsafe" (e.g. Creative Commons-licenced) and that CC would be a partner along with Coke and others. Now he's approved terms that don't allow people to use cc-licenced legal samples (e.g. background music from a site like ccmixter.org) and that give up all rights to your content to the sponsors in an exclusive licence that lasts forever.
After speaking to local CC legal lead, Andrew Rens, we're making the following suggestions:
- That podcasters retain their rights to their work.
- That, in entering the competition, they grant the world a non-exclusive CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence and
- That they grant the sponsors a limited (for, say, 5 years) commercial licence to use the work for publicity etc.
Lets see what turns out, but its really heartening to see how many switched-on individuals there are in the local blogosphere to point this out :)
Update: Steven Davis from Apple has amended the terms and conditions of the competition according to Paul's suggestions. I'm thrilled. This is a really great victory for bloggers in SA. In the last 24h it has made me swear terribly and loudly and whoop for joy :)
