what are PUMs, please? PermanentlyUnlineMen?
Well, I see your point, and I had the same feeling. On the other hand, I know how everybody including me tends to skip lengthy smallprint reads on legal stuff, so ideally one might try to do a very much simplified display of what the license allows and what not.
Problem remains that in todays online world, people do get confused about where commercial use starts, so let me do a quick brainstorm on that, possibly to be moved to the help section or some more prominent place later on...
Personally, I would take a very conservative view on the "commercial use" question, which would be quite hard to actually enforce online.
What should be clear is that anything involving the use of tracks aquired via wikiloops and leading to receiving money has to be considered commercial use.
If you sell a CD or a download with wikiloops tracks, or your remixes of wikiloops tracks, these are commercial activities of the most obvious category. It doesn't matter if you actually sell anything, your attempt to do that is a commercial activity.
The second level of commercial use which I'd consider as such would not have to involve direct cash revenues for music - if you p.e. use wikiloops music in an advertising videoclip for a product you are selling, that would be commercial use as well.
If you would use a wikiloops track in an advertising for some charity cause or nonprofit thing, I would not consider that commercial use if you didn't get paid for creating the clip, and named all participants and wikiloops as required by the WL public license.
And last, we have the third level of commercial use, which I like to referr to as "the grey zone". This happens whenever wikiloops tracks are reuploaded to other web platforms, be it facebook, youtube, soundcloud or any other service you may think of.
You may upload tracks to these platforms for your private enjoyment, to "share with friends" or with whatever motivation.
If you chose to place ads along your shared content (as you can do on youtube videos), that would be a very obvious case of commercial use, but even if you do not do that,
the service provider of that platform is not a non profit livingroom extension, but a commercial enterprise.
You may not be enjoying any monetary benefits when sharing wikiloops music on some third party website, but they surely will, and -without realizing that- you will grant them the right to do that when uploading.
It's a huge mess that the web 2.0 area has created, and my hopes to sort that out are very little to tell you the truth.
Bottom line, as long as the requirements of the public license are met (including nameing the participating members and wikiloops) and your use doesn't fall into the obvious commercial activities mentioned in level 1 or 2, you are good to go.
Any other projects invovling wikiloops tracks do require prior written consent by all involved participants.
The idea to offer some kind of simple looking decision finder tool that lets you check wether your desired usecase is covered by our license might be a good idea.
That will be a bit complicated to set up, but if the user can narrow down his or hers use-idea step by step, that might be a cool tool to have.... I'll think about that a little.
