Commercial Podcaster but poor, terms changed

Teresa, who handles all the free-music requests from podcasters, emailed me to explain that she thinks some people are taking advantage of our "commercial but poor" no cost podcast music license:

I am starting to receive more requests from podcast producers wanting to use the music for commercial purposes. These are creators who are very similar to the wedding video producers. They are putting together podcasts for a client's website (or the clients themselves are advertising a service on the web). Another example is an exercise podcast for a subscription fee. The budgets are, of course, under $50,000, but they are ultimately for-profit ventures. If this kind of low-budget use still conforms to the spirit of creative commons non-commercial (I am not so sure) and you want to continue with the under 50K giveaway, no problem. An alternative is to cover these use cases with a new commercial podcasting license category-- set at a low cost to accommodate the producer-on-a-budget, perhaps similar to the video/slideshow rates.

I agree with Teresa, that if an agency is being paid to create a podcast as part of a web site design, this is commercial use, not Creative Commons non-commercial, and stretching our "commercial-but-poor" terms too far.
so, I've changed the commercial-but-poor license to a lower threshold ($1000 per year of profit) and only for advertising, specifically no longer allowing paid-subscription podcasts and I-was-paid-to-make-this-podcast type situation.
The new language is:

Commercial-but-poor: if your podcast is commercial you can still use our music on your podcast for free, as long as 1) your only commercial activity is limited to selling advertising, and your annual "gross profit" (gross sales minus gross expenses before salaries) is less than $1000 per year, 2) you give attribution on the podcast to the Magnatune songs as defined below, and 3) a short audio advertisement for Magnatune in your own voice shows up in the podcast, saying something similar to "Some of the songs on this program were provided by Magnatune.com, Magnatune is a really interesting music web site that lets you listen for free, name the price you want to pay, and half their revenue goes directly to the artist. Check out www.magnatune.com". Any other commercial activity requires an low-cost "Internet" license (such as if you were paid to create the podcast, or charge a subscription fee).

I also added a "commercial podcast" choice for the "type of web site" question, with the fees being half as much as the "personal web site" license, which is also very low cost (for example, it's $22 for a 1 year license for music to a no-budget podcast).
This is a difficult line to walk, between allowing fair use from well-meaning people, and being taken advantage of in other situations.
I welcome feedback on this...
-john

Comments

[Marco Raaphorst]

The term Non-commercial is still confusing. But according to Mia's piece (http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/attachments/20060306/fafdd587/NonCommercialGuidelinesclean-0001.pdf) this is not commercial use. If the music is not used for advertisement or the major part of the podcast.

But agreed, it is confusing. Here in Holland we have public cable TV; lots of these programs are paid from tax. When a NC-song is used for a program some believe it's legal to do so, others don't.