Another View of Creative Commons

[rolanni]

Nipped from badgermirlacca on a list we both frequent.

Creative Commons Humbug
By John C. Dvorak

Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair use" provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.

If you are unfamiliar with this thing, be sure to go to the Web site and see if you can figure it out. Creative Commons actually seems to be a dangerous system with almost zero benefits to the public, copyright holders, or those of us who would like a return to a shorter-length copyright law.

The rest of the editorial here

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I thought he made some good points, about this underlying the protections already in place. (I almost posted a link to this in my journal, too, but got distracted.)

I mean, if I want my work distributed freely for non-profit uses only, I can just say that, and still hold all the other rights.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Professor Lessig, the ...intellect that formed the creative commons notion is rather prone to thinking up Huge Problems(tm) that don't exist and then trying to change the world in order to correct the imaginary problem. In my more uncharitable moments, I think he's doing it to get tenure -- but, really, he probably has tenure by this point.

One of the good professor's other bright ideas is that there are hundreds of thousands of "orphaned" works littering the artistic landscape, unfairly locked away from cultural exploitation by draconian and antiquated copyright laws. In fact, there are not huge numbers of "orphaned" works; most copyright holders can be discovered by simply expending a little effort, but Professor Lessig didn't bother to find that out -- or he knows it and deliberately ignores it, because acknowledging the fact would mean his cool theory was useless.

...not that I'm completely out of patience with the man, or anything...

[jack_calls_dances]

For a different view, check out this article from The Independent Weekly a local newsweekly (in central North Carolina). It takes the point of view that copyright as it currently exists stifles creativity becuase corporations are able to sit on mountains of copyrighted material, keeping others from building on it or basing new work from it and that artists are forced to choose between protecting everything and protecting nothing. Interesting and well written.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've seen this argument. As a small, independent business person -- and not a monster corporation -- I think that the people who are trying to set creativity free for the greater good of society perhaps have their hearts in the right place, but haven't thought their "solutions" through. All of the "solutions" to copyright I've seen so far have either (1) neglected the actual reality of copyright law, (2) been aimed at large corporations, who will either ignore or sidestep the revisions in copyright, while those same revisions will cause most freelancers to crash and burn.

In point of fact, copyright isn't broken. I will entertain the theory that Walt Disney Corporation is broken, if you like, but I'm not Da Mouse.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Yes. There is this pervasive belief that copyrights are things owned by Big Corporations, not individuals like you and me trying to make a living. I got into it recently with someone who tried to argue that it should be okay to reprint the works of an author who's dead, because after all, he's dead, right, and can't be paid for them. I told him to let me know where he lived, because as soon as he was dead I was planning to move into his house, take his car, and throw his kids into the street.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

To put it rudely, that's bullshit.

We know for sure that roughly 95% of authors go out of print for good within four years of their death. The works of dead authors are, for the most part, unprofitable; there are exceptions but they're the 5%, not the vast majority of us. If the work is therefore out of print, unprofitable, and not going to come back into print on any commercial basis, then having some fan move in and try to make it available isn't going to hurt anyone because there's no money being made in the first place.

In contrast, a 70 year post-mortem absolute copyright term is ... well, suppose my wife is pregnant and I'm run over by a car and killed. That post mortem copyright term isn't going to simply keep my wife and (never-met) child running; it'll go to support that child's kids well into middle age. Total strangers. It's greivous and excessive and goes way too far against the public interest.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to see a system of life plus ten years, with an option for the heirs to register an interest somewhere public (say, a register held by a library of record?) and obtain rolling extensions that run for ten more years, up to a maximum of, say, 50 years post-mortem. One the one hand, this would see the notional spouse-n-kids out, without providing for a generation of rent-seekers. On the other hand, if the stuff is out of print and nobody cares, then it falls into the public domain after a decade.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

Terrific. Let's apply that rule to everything you own: all rights to your property, whether it's any good or not, whether it might someday turn into a valuable antique or not, expire ten years after your death. Your family owned a farm? Tough. You had a vase that you wanted to take to Antiques Roadshow? Too bad.

The issue is that this is PROPERTY. And it is the only kind of property out there that can be taken away from an estate after a set time period. I think that's sufficient contribution to the public good, thank you.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's not property.

You're wrong.

A simple example: Suppose I have a car. I give you the car: I no longer own the car.

I have a story? I tell you the story: now you have the story, and I have the story. It doesn't magically erase itself from my head when I pass it on to you.

From this, we see that information is fundamentally different from physical goods. Trying to pretend otherwise is rubbish. To the extent that we treat it like property, we do so because of a body of law constructed -- originally -- to provide an incentive for us to create more information, for the public good. It's an artificial construct, not a natural one.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I've thought for a long time that Dvorak was an arsehole; now he's gone and proven the case.

He failed to read and comprehend the CC licenses. He failed to read and comprehend the rationale for CC licenses. He emailed the webmaster and when nobody mailed back to hold his poor widdle hand and explain things to him, he decided to throw a faux-tantrum and use his own incompetence and incomprehension as the lynch-pin of a pillory-piece, if you'll permit the mixed metaphor.

(Speaking as someone who has read the CC licenses, and who has released a book under the no-derivs no-commercial-reuse license on the basis of a marketing proposal that won the support of Penguin and Time Warner UK's marketing folk, I feel qualified to call a sack of shit when I see one.)

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

I've seen the Creative Commons used in programming, when the idea is to share CSS files so that other programmers can see how you did nifty stuff. But you don't want them to copy your design, just be able to use the bits and pieces necessary to make their own design. You can't say "fair use" because you're really using the one file to educate on how a file is written...so whether 10% or 90% of the resulting file shares code with the first one, it's still a learning process used to create a new file. You change one thing...see what breaks...change something else...and eventually you have something that's largely new.

That works for computer files. I can't imagine it would be at all useful for fiction or even non-fiction texts. (Except maybe recipes...)

[autopope.livejournal.com]

CC is useful for fiction -- within the context of a midlist author trying to increase audience mindshare.

Releasing work under a CC license doesn't mean you're relinquishing copyright control; quite the contrary. What you are doing is setting forth the precise usage to which a user can put your work. You might be letting them do anything they want -- or you might choose one of the more restrictive licenses, to prevent them from re-selling the work or making derivative works (such as movies) without negotiating payments to you.

In my case, I've released a novel as a CC-licensed download at the same time as the hardcover was published; if you take the (restrictive) CC license I chose, and drop the whole internet/download/booga-booga hot-button issue out of the equation, what I've done is simply make the book available to readers on the same basis they'd be able to get it from a public library. If you're a midlist author, your biggest enemy is obscurity: you want mind-share at [almost] any cost. Giving readers a chance to download a novel is exactly as much of a "threat" to my income stream as allowing libraries to buy hardbacks and lend them out -- that is, it isn't: because today's free library borrower/downloader is tomorrow's purchaser. Without the CC license (which has been researched and prepared by some fairly astute lawyers) I'd have had a hell of a time rolling my own license or worrying about how to protect my rights to the work. This way, there's a well-defined framework within which I can grant readers limited access to the book without permitting, for example, pirate commercial copies (which would erode my market).

This is why idiots like Dvorak get me annoyed, by spouting off about something that they personally have no use for, on the assumption that nobody else can have any use for it either. Used correctly, the Creative Commons licenses can be a very useful marketing support tool for jobbing midlist authors.