Creative Commons Denmark has just announced that KODA, the Danish Authors’ Society, is now offering noncommercial Creative Commons licensing to its members – making it the second country worldwide to do so. A similar pilot project was initiated in 2007 by Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands. Both show that collective rights management and Creative Commons licenses can be combined to the benefit of creators. As Paul Keller of Creative Commons Netherlands notes, “Creators can rely on the strength of collective rights management for commercial uses of their works, while taking noncommercial online distribution into their own hands by using Creative Commons licenses.”

KODA’s adoption of Creative Commons licensing marks a breakthrough for Danish composers and lyricists wanting to explore new ways of making their work available online while at the same time collecting commercial royalties through KODA.

Members must sign an agreement with the KODA in which they indicate which works they wish to license, and for the purpose of this arrangement, only Creative Commons licenses with the “noncommercial” condition can be used.

For more information about this exciting initiative and other Danish projects, please visit CC Denmark’s website (Danish). And for those of you who missed it, last week we posted about the first album in Denmark to be released under a CC license in cooperation with KODA: Tone‘s “Small Arm of the Sea” (download).