Is the selling of user songs on bandcamp not a violation of the "NonCommercial" part of the creative commons license we all agree to whenever we submit a song? I know the money is supposedly being given to charities, but at least one of these "charities" is on extremely shaky ground regarding its status as a charity (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Global_Network_Foundation#501(c)(3)_transparency,_tax_concerns,_and_New_Impact_Partners_allegations ). Furthermore, we only have puke7's word that he is donating the money to charity, right? Even further still, people might have preferences about which charities they would want to support. Luckily, when you have money you can use it to support whichever charity you want. Your money, your choice. puke7 never asked us which charity to support. Because it's his money, right? That's commercial. He's selling our songs and then using the money (or not) on charities that he believes are a good cause. It's at his discretion. It's his money. If you run a business and donate some of your money to a charity that doesn't make you a charity. You are still engaging in commercial enterprise.

Even if botb were a charity, "uses by organizations, by individuals, or for charitable purposes are less commercial but not decidedly noncommercial." Source: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial#From_the_Executive_Summary

In summary, I believe selling our songs on bandcamp violates the NonCommercial license that we uploaded them under. Please either take the songs down off of bandcamp or stop charging money for them. At the very least ask people before you put them up. Thank you!

There are actually two different CC licenses that apply to entries. The CC BY-NC-SA

license with the non-commercial clause that you're referring to is the publicly visible license. There's also a CC BY-ND

license specifically for BotB/puke7 which does not include the non-commercial clause - it looks like this is the license that lets BotB sell the major albums on Bandcamp.

https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/BotB+CC+License/

I didn't realize how permissive these licenses were. That's crazy that puke7 basically owns everyone's music and can do what he wants with it, including sell for profit. It would be nice if this site were a little bit clearer to new people about that. The lyceum page you linked says "distribute" but it's not clear that that includes selling, you'd have to look up the license yourself to learn that that's the case.

I know we can't see all of the sales numbers, but judging by the number of supporters on the Bandcamp releases, I doubt that puke7 is making much of a profit (if any) compared to the time/money costs required to keep up the site.

the distribution/selling-license was added so the bandcamp-sales can happen.

the only reason why bandcamp-releases cost money is because bandcamp is only giving you 200 free downloads per month, and after that it sets a default of $7 for any release iirc. to avoid that, chipchamp makes the newest release free for everyone, and only sets a price after the next release appears.

the sales were used for a few months for donations to BLM and UNICEF in early 2020.

this is not the case anymore. the little earnings of the sales are now going to puke7 alone again. together with the patreon, they give him some money but not enough for living or working on botb fulltime.

all of it is already freely accessible to anyone. think of the tiny bandcamp payment as small thanks for consolidating the album metadata and making it easily available via bandcamp, and for making and hosting this website we all use for free that he works tirelessly on

puke isnt some faceless corporation bent on capitalist exploitation of your creative commons chiptunes lmfao, he's a dude whos trying to make the best for all the n00bs here

> That's crazy that puke7 basically owns everyone's music and can do what he wants with it, including sell for profit

i mean, if it's Creative commons, everyone basically owns everyone's music right? Like, I could sell all your music for profit too and noone could stop me.

that is wrong on multiple levels. just because you licence something doesn't mean your copyright goes away, we don't publish botb works as public domain and for good reason.

if you look at any botb entry, there is a link to the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

it is true that we only reserve some rights per the terms of the licence, but the licence doesn't grant permission to use the work for commercial purposes -- usually monetary gain. even if that wasn't the case, you would still have to correctly attribute the work, which would require you to link to the original work which is freely (as in price) available anyway

If you aren't paying for the product, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT

It's mind boggling to me that this isn't more common knowledge... I've known about it since forever, myself.