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Creative Commons In the News
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Mar 15, 2005 05:49 PM
from the remix-this dept.
from the remix-this dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC is running an article on a new licensing scheme being used to bring civility to the world of copyright." From the article: "Interest in Creative Commons licenses comes as artists, authors and traditional media companies begin to warm to the idea of the Internet as friend instead of foe, and race to capitalize on technologies such as file-sharing and digital copying." At the same time, mpesce writes "Boing Boing is
reporting that the Australian equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, the MEAA, has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions. 'The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought
by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be inappropriate.'"
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One sentence license: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's so hard about that?
Re:One sentence license: (Score:2, Informative)
They do have a Public Domain [creativecommons.org] dedication. Even better.
Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you put an encyclopedia entry in the public domain and I fail my history lesson as a result I can sue you for damages. For the crime of being wrong? I can sue you for damages because the color of your tie offended me and caused my widdle heart to go pitter-patter, but I'd lose. And so would you.
Blah, if you put an mp3 in the public domain and it trashes my mp3 player I can sue you for damages. Hofstadter posits in one of his essays (published e
Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Insightful)
No, copyright does not cover the "idea" which your song expressed, it covers the exact embodiment of your song. When I convert your song to another embodiment I'm making a derivative work of your embodiment, which is why it is also covered by your copyright.
The copyright isn't about the paper I put ink on or the canvas I painted on or the floppy disk I saved my thesis on then stapled to the submission form. It is about the text in the floppy, the image on the canvas that matters. Your logic is flawed (calling a copy in a different format "derivative work [answers.com]" indeed. The term is applied to works where you add some small value such as a translation or typesetting or performance or additional text or notes, where the original work makes up a basis for the derivative too large to dismiss as fair use or quoting. Ripping your CD to mp3s adds no literary or other artistic merit to the work, it simply copies it to newer, more convenient "paper" with "better" ink) yet the outcome of your thought process is still valid: the song/picture/movie/document is still copyrighted.
Yes, you are responsible for the damage an mp3 does to my equipment.
So if you download an Aerosmith mp3 from kazaa, and your ipod freezes up, you're going to sue Aerosmith? You ignore the fact that beyond my song being present, there is no control over the container with certain CC licenses that allow re-encoding or re-distributing (hell, with "All Rights Reserved" copyright in effect, they still can't crush all illegal copying. Are you going to go to court and insist that you thought the mp3 was an authorized Aerosmith good being given away by Aerosmith for free because copying is illegal so therefore the mp3 must be legal?). If A records a song, B re-encodes it in a malicious format and sends it to you, you can try suing A, but the judge will call you to the bench, slap you, tell you to sue B, and dismiss the case. If you somehow win, A will appeal, and appleals court judges slap harder.
present something as factually correct when it is not you open yourself up to litigation if your claims cause damage.
Yet there are millions of idiots in this world all claiming things that are flagrantly, even intentionally incorrect. Yet aside from claiming incorrect things about someone (ie, libel or slander) I don't see a lot of lawsuits over how Jane told Billy she had a headache that night but was really just turned off by the fact that he ate a garlic sandwitch after dinner. If I have a page reading "On Formally Decidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" consisting of a thesis that at every turn attempts to disprove Godel's law, with no text beyond the title and the body of the thesis and a CC license at the bottom, with no other statement indicating that in reality, I stapled my Mathematics PhD to my application form and failed to get my Doctorate, can you sue me for that? Even though I make no claims claiming I am a math whiz? Does the CC license matter? What if I marked it "All Rights Reserved"?
A formular for making styrofoam cups is indeed an invention Yes, and I explicitly stated that inventions are separate, as they can blow up and kill people. Shakespeare does not blow up and kill people, no matter how long you cook it. Brittney Spears does not blow up and kill people.
Mona Lisa secretly blows up when noone is looking, the rest of the time she smirks about what she's getting away with. The formula for TNT can be used to blow up and kill people. See the difference? Literary work, musical work, artistic work, invention.
And now we're on rat poison on a playground which has nothing to do with copyright, and even less to do with creative commons licenses for copyrighted works.
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Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Interesting)
But wait, what were we arguing about again? I thougt it was somethign about how if I made a song and a copy of that song blew up your player, that was my fault. Somewhere there was a d
Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Insightful)
These "things" have far too many bloody rights and leeway as it is. They aren't "natural people" but are treated as such too often.
Providing them further opportunities to increase their profit margins without giving anything back is simply not good. It ultimately benefits nobody but shareholders and overpaid directors. IMHO =)
Anyway, more on-topic, these actions in the industry make me question how far the balance of money and love for the art is going to be pushed. It's p
Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Insightful)
Making money. All is well if you're a consumer, not all is well if you're a producer.
Re:One sentence license: (Score:5, Interesting)
What if I write something truly insightful in one of these posts? Then, later, I use the same words in a speech when I'm running for some government office?
If I release the text into the public domain, others can take those words and reuse them without any credit required. I could take Tom Sawyer and republish the novel without listing the author at all; neither he nor his descendents have any rights to the book.
But, if I reuse the words later in another context, I could be accused of plagiarism. It might be difficult to prove that I was the original author of text that had been passed around through the public domain for X years. By retaining copyright on my posts, I can force those that wish to quote them to attribute them to me.
(This did happen. Someone from a public domain advocacy website wanted to use quotes from one of my slashdot posts on his site. But he had released all text on his site into the public domain. I had to decline unless he could change his license, not because I care where my words were used, but because I care that they be attributed to me.
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Whoa (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, stick with the realm of possible here for just a few minutes. I can't get past this line.
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Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that was one of my Web sites [respectthe...domain.org]. However, since my interaction with you is getting lumped into a discussion of plagarism, I would mention that I do not plagarize -- everything I put up there is extensively cited and credited. The reason I didn't change my license for you was simply that other people were more easy-going, so there was no need to pursue your writing.
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Specificity counts in licensing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of two reasons off the top of my head:
Anti-Comeptitive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. They're a union; it's their job to be anti-competitive. (That is, to protect their members from competition with non-members.) Essentially, the MEAA is a labor cartel, placing restrictions on members' output to boost the asking price.
Cheers,
IT
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Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a time-honored tradition. Don't look too deeply into it.
Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot does not have a monopoly on bad grammar (Score:2, Funny)
Silly MEAA (Score:2)
And how is that bad, exactly?
Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)
On a totally different note. I was thinking about the part of the GPL that most people really don't get: the offer to supply source code at a later date. More than any other part of the GPL that section really confuses people. Maybe we should make a GPL-lite, where source code simply MUST accompany all binary distributions. That'd clear up the confusion for programs licensed under it at least.
Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case, I permitted free distribution of the piece, restricted anyone from selling a reprint of it without my permission, and did not want anyone to build upon to work to preserve it's artistic integrity. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong there.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.
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Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like telling me where I can take my car, or what kind of tires I have to use. It's like needing the arquitect's(sp) permission the paint my house. The closest thing you have to natural rights on a work is to have your name attached. Everything else is fair game. The "artistic integrity" is in your eyes only. Your rights to property are determined by the society you live in. They are NOT absolute or inherent.
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Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:4, Insightful)
Because you enjoy it? (Rhetorical question; the answer is "yes".)
If you don't enjoy it, then don't do it; nobody's forcing to you be creative. Get a job at McDonald's if that's what floats your boat.
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Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:2)
It's freedom for you to make your own choice about wether you wish to have your icons included in the distribution (using your example above). If it's good enough
Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's a power when you deciding whether others can distribute copies of your digital work; that's licensing, telling others what they are allowed to do with the covered work. It would be a freedom if you were deciding for yourself whether to incorporate the work in something of yours. It's ironic that you bring up RMS later on in your post, because he reminds us that the di [gnu.org]
Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's because people believe that they *are* a good idea?
Suppose you make an icon set and place it under one of the Creative Commons licenses that has the non-commercial restriction. This means that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and all the other commercial Linux distributions can't put your icon set on their CD.
First of all, no it doesn't. What it means is that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc can't put your icon set on CDs that they *sell*. They're perfectly free to include it in a downloadable ISO, or some other means.
Second of all, if someone's making money of something *I* made, why should it not be me? (Or, why is it such a big deal if they have to contact me first?)
It means that only people who contact you directly can use your icon set.
Yes, well let's see: there's Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse... who else? I can see how difficult it is for *all these people* to contact me - man, how could I ever manage the time to talk to them all? There are clearly tens of people who are selling Linux commercially.
That's hardly freedom.
Bullshit. They're perfectly free to make their own icons.
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Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:3, Insightful)
Because there's like 999,999,999,999,999 little packages in a big fat thing called a distro, made by untold countless people, all of who would be angry that they didn't get their 1 cent per 1000 CDs sold.
What you propose means that each company has to hold and maintain a contract for every single little micro-deal made. That means tons of lawyers, tons of phone calls, tons of paper (yes, paper,) tons of beaurocracy, tons of this, that, and
Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is entirely beside the point. If they want to *sell* something, they have to create it, or get permission from the author. If it's valuable enough for them, they will.
What actually happens is this: Someone's looking over icon collections. They see a cool one, "Oh, that's neat." "Oh, wait- non-commercial. Can't use it. Damn..."
Except that it doesn't actually happen that way. If a company wants to distribute some
Gotta love Creative Commons! (Score:2)
Most of the writing I do, however, I'm not licensing yet. I need to see how the rights that mainstream magazine and anthology publishers want to buy work alongside Creative Commons licenses. Some of us still want to make money off our writing someday (well, we can dream, at least).
Over a barrel (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the above phrase is being overlooked by most people. I mean that's a pretty strong statement, to paraphrase, "I/We forbid you to do any work that does not make us money."
The question I have, is that part of "the members" contract or is this "a new policy"?
Either way I have to wonder just how far they can go at curtailing a members outside activities.
Re:Over a barrel (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless I'm mistaken, they offered MORE THAN DOUBLE payscale. 110% above normal.
They just plain forbid members to do any Creative Commons work. They refuse to accept Creative Commons money and they forbid their members to take any Creative Commons money.
I can't help picturing a black man sitting down in a diner and the white owner telling the waitresses they can't serve him any food, even after he offers to pay double. "We don't
Re:Over a barrel (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, of course, who is "we?" Sounds like some sort of union "high counsel" making the decision and not the rank and file. In the long run, CC-licensed productions may be the best thing to happen to the industry, but it sounds like the union management has their head right up there with the MPAA's - deep in their respective asses that is.
Unfortunately, I bet SAG will be just as myopic too.
Suggestion (Score:3, Informative)
Artitsts? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why this is a good thing for actors... (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of a professional associations, wheither it is something like the American Medical Association (for doctors), the American Bar Association (for lawyers), or the Screen Actors Guild, is that you want to restrict exactly who is going to be a "member" of the club. Basically, this is a hold-over from the medieval trade guilds, where they viewed people practicing their "craft", if done in a free-for-all fashion could kill their entire industry. (BTW, I'm mainly familiar with these American institutions, but there are many others like this throughout the world).
One way that these organizations help to improve their "craft" or "profession" is to try and restrict membership in the form of formal certificates... often issued through a government and where possible even enforced and backed up by laws that make it illegal to practice that craft without possessing that certificate.
The purpose of this is to make a small pool of hopefully talented people where there will be enough work available to keep everybody comfortable, and raise wages for the members of the organization. Some sports player associations in the USA have done an incredibly good job at raising the salaries of its members, notably the Major League Baseball Players Association and the National Basketball Players Association.
In the case here, the MEAA is merely trying to cull out the riff raff and try to keep its members from getting involved in projects that would from their perspective lower the value of the rest of its members.
A comment was made on another message board [apc.org.au] that this would in effect keep unemployed actors from getting jobs. This is precisely what the intent is here, where they are trying to drive out in this case actors with low skill. By following the Creative Commons license it doesn't seem likely that actors participating in these projects will ever make substantial amounts of money. Indeed, the attempt here is that actors who are so desparate that they want to participate in films like this should not be in the profession anyway (from the viewpoint of the MEAA). By restricting its members they will (hopefully) be improving the income for its remaining members.
The danger in a situation like this for any guild-like organization is that non-members and ex-members may totally ignore the guild and either form a rival organization that permits the activity being banned (in this case a group that would be willing to work under the Creative Commons license), or that the guild would be so dilluted in power due to small membership that it would be ineffective. This BTW is the problem with a guild-like organization for computer programmers (there are a few but fortunately/unfortunately they are all rather small).
If you think projects for actors involved with something like a project with the Creative Commons license (or other open source equivalent) could make some money, it would have to be from this financial aspect that you would have to encourage the MEAA.
Unfortunately, from experience with the open source movement I don't see this as a positive experience to compare what computer programmers are getting paid via open source programming projects vs. closed source programming projects. This isn't to say that humanity and mankind in general aren't better off for having open source projects, but from the perspective of a professional guild I can see that it is incompatable with the ideas of the open source community.
Re:you know (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, and Denmark is full of clog wearing porn stars who own chocolate factories.
And, France is full of stuck up arrogant smokers who.. (oh wait, that one's true)
Can you at least try not to generalise an entire nation?
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Re:you know (Score:4, Funny)
Why am I just being told this now??!?!?!
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Re:you know (Score:2)
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Re:you know (Score:2)
Well, you're not here, so there's one racist bastard that we don't have...
Re:you know (Score:3, Funny)
Area - land: 7,617,930 sq km
Area - comparative: Slightly smaller than the US contiguous 48 states
Population: 19,913,144 (July 2004 est.)
This tells us that there are only approximately 2.6 people per square km, and thus, unless these are really enormous people, Australia is most definitely not full.
Therefore, you are proven wrong.
Re:Addendum (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Addendum (Score:3)
Historically (until 30 years ago), there's that whole 'White Australia' policy.
I don't know much about the interim, but more recently, they've tightened restrictions on immigrants who aren't exceptionally skilled with English, while touting it as a plan to have an open and nondiscriminatory immigration policy. More like whitewash it.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999
Re:not just money (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely, yet observe how many horrendous works come out after an artist/author dies. Think Dr. Suess would have stood still for the trashing of The Cat in the Hat?
For some utterly bizarre reason people feel they must retain absolute control of
Re:I suspect (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.quest4.org/ccna/
I guess some people might think it is crappy, but in the end, I hope to have a test question pool that equals the questions in software that sells for anywhere between 10.00 and 60.00 (true, you do get some extra features).
Why did I release under a Creative Commons? Because I really wish someone could fill in the holes and come up with a really goo
Please dismiss this account with a better reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Union Ideal Gone Sour (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that the standard provision gets in the way of the CC license. There is no obvious or practical solution here. The actors are asked to donate their right to publicity, which is simply outside the scope of the deal. The reason this provision is collectively negotiated serves largely to benefit the union members, but it does limit the scope of flexibility actors in the union have to give broader rights. And it does this by design.
Now, I'm a US lawyer, so I may just be guessing what is going on down under. But that would be the problem if the issue came up here.
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