> Does anyone really think it's fair for a giant corporate music company to
use their legacy marketing and distribution networks to make money off albums
released under free culture CC licenses, and give none of that money back to
the artists?
This question includes an implicit assumption that copyright somehow prevents
this. In fact, the usual case is for the original author to sign off
copyright to some sort of company, or to never have copyright on the work to
begin with because they were doing work for that company (and so the company
gets the copyright).
> the purpose of the NC clause is to prevent this injustice
That may be, but the effect of the NC clause is to make it impossible for
poor artists to make money from their derivatives of the covered work.
Corporations have been dealing with copyright for centuries, with the
expectation that no license to use anything copyrighted can be obtained at
all. If they can't use your drawing of a panda, they can easily pay someone
to make another drawing of a panda.
But if you're a poor artist, you have to do everything yourself. So if you
can't draw pandas and can't make money off of that panda drawing, then sorry!
No food for you tonight. Or you can just give up on art and start holding up
a "will work for food" sign.
So the effect of non-commercial clauses is to hurt the poor and have no
effect on the rich. That's bad enough. But it's also bad for a much more
basic reason: it's an unjust restriction. If I sell tables and tell you that,
therefore, you are not allowed to sell tables, I'm sure you would be able to
see why that is unjust. If you have any legal good or service you want to
sell to anyone, you have a right to sell it. That's the whole point of
capitalism. The idea that someone is deserved a monopoly on the sale of a
good or service just because they were the first to do so is absurd. And yet,
that's the idea that copyright operates under. So copyright itself is unjust.
The only acceptable use of copyright is copyleft.
