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Patents Censorship

Creative Commons In the News 253

Posted by Zonk 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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Creative Commons In the News More

Creative Commons In the News

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  • One sentence license: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:51PM (#11947846)
    Any one can use this free of charge for anything, forever.

    What's so hard about that?

    • Any one can use this free of charge for anything, forever.

      What's so hard about that?

      They do have a Public Domain [creativecommons.org] dedication. Even better.

      • Note that part of the license which states that you can be sued if your work is defective. Lovely isn't it. That's why most people at least use something like the 2 clause BSD license. Cause it has this big fat disclaimer on it that says "you can't find me liable for defects."

        • Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Informative)

          by Siniset ( 615925 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:09PM (#11948007) Homepage Journal
          i don't think you understand what the liability is in the public domain copyright notice: it is that if the work of art is not in the the public domain, the person publishing it can be held accountable. It's not liability if something breaks, but rather if you don't have rights over it in the first place.
          • That may well be so, but you can still be sued for damages caused by a work if you place a defective work in the public domain.
            • i believe the creative commons copyrights are not for computer programs primarily, it would be much harder to determine damages if your work is a book than a computer program.

              If you are talking about a computer program, then your are correct, you would need a lisence that protects the creator from damage liability.

            • That makes sense. Think about what kind of damages the copywritten material CC is designed to cover can cause. Unlike an invention, it can't blow up and kill anyone. Unlike software it can't erase your harddrive.

              Instead, damages for copyright are generally plagarism, libel, various hate-speech laws. I'd like to see you try license away your responsibility for the content you put out from these kind of things.
              • Blah, if you put an mp3 in the public domain and it trashes my mp3 player I can sue you for damages. 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. Hell, if you put a formular for making styrofoam cups in the public domain and someone sues me for spilling coffee in their lap because the cup was too heat sensitive I can countersue you for damages. It's not just software.

                • Re:One sentence license: (Score:3, Interesting)

                  by Qzukk ( 229616 )
                  a formular for making styrofoam cups is an invention.

                  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
    • I love people. I hate corporates.
      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:2, Interesting)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )
      All my ideas are free to use - CONDITIONAL - You use mine you give me yours.

      A better licence for copyright and patents (it's recursive and can spread rapidly - As microsoft would say very viral in nature).

    • Any one can use this free of charge for anything, forever. What's so hard about that?

      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)

      by SydShamino ( 547793 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @08:29PM (#11948768)
      One downside of public domain is that it doesn't nothing to avoid the implication of plagiarism.

      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. /shrug)

      • Whoa (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @08:39PM (#11948884)
        "What if I write something truly insightful in one of these posts? "

        Dude, stick with the realm of possible here for just a few minutes. I can't get past this line.

      • Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @10:21PM (#11949725)
        So plagiarism of Tom Sawyer is a serious problem these days? Get real. You're making a mountain out of a molehill. Most people (even assuming they are unethical in the first place) don't plagiarize not because of copyright but because it would damage their professional reputation if found out (or in school, get them expelled). But hey, if you're so paranoid someone's going to "steal" your words, please copyright the hell out of them; even better, don't release them in the first place. I notice, by the way, the public domain guy seemed perfectly willing to acknowledge you and even asked your permission. That's what most reasonable and honest people do. I just don't understand the big deal here - how are you going to suffer if someday, somewhere someone quotes your slashdot post without attribution? Copyrighted or not, it's pretty easy to prove you originated the words with a search engine, if it becomes an issue, and probably embarrass the person who plagiarized them. Would really take them to court though (the only benefit of copyright I can see)? To me people who obsess with the copyright of the most trivial minutiae seem to have hair up their ass.

      • Re:One sentence license: (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Wednesday March 16, 2005 @02:29AM (#11951089) Homepage
        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.

        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.

    • I can think of two reasons off the top of my head:

      1. It's insufficiently clear, believe it or not, for audiences that take copyright power seriously. Copyright grants powers that should be clearly qualified or dismissed if you want to convince most large commercial organizations that you're seriously placing no terms on the work. Debian, to name a group /. readers are probably familiar with, would criticize the license because it doesn't explicitly give permission to copy the work, make derivative works,

  • Anti-Comeptitive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PepeGSay ( 847429 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @06:52PM (#11947856)
    Does anyone else see the MEAA's decision as anti-competitive?

    • Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:05PM (#11947968)
      Does anyone else see the MEAA's decision as anti-competitive?

      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

      • Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:3, Insightful)

        by awful ( 227543 )
        The MEAA has always been quite inflexible when it comes to allowing it's members to work on projects that want to use different ways of getting actor participation. In the past actors have been prevented from working on projects for little-or-no pay (e.g. short low-or-no-budget films) because the MEAA has been worried that unscrupulous producers will plead poverty to avoid paying actors the proper industry rates. This move to prevent particpation in Creative Commons projects would appear to be from the same

        • Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:2, Interesting)

          by pavon ( 30274 )
          The parent post is identical to a post in the original story [apc.org.au] linked from Boing Boing.

          Same person or copy-paste karma-whore? - You decide.
        • > The remix (somehow) makes money, but the actor doesn't get paid for appearing in
          > what is bascially a 'new' work.

          OH NOES! THE SKY SI FALLING!?

          Why is it not up to the actor concerned, as to whether they want to participate in such a work?

    • Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 )
      Its basically an actors' guild, and actors' guilds have always been asshats about what their members do or don't do. I'm sure if the actors want to show up in CC films, they'll do what actors who want to ignore their guilds have always done: be credited with a pseudonym.

      It's a time-honored tradition. Don't look too deeply into it.
      • Australia is a relatively small country, with a small film, television, and theatre industry. Consequently, there's not that many professional actors. Particularly when talking about mature actors in regular work, they'd all be instantly recognisable.

    • Re:Anti-Comeptitive (Score:3, Informative)

      by pavon ( 30274 )
      Well, yeah. They are essentially a union and unions by nature are anti-competetive. Their purpose for existance is create solidarity among the workforce so that they are not competing against one another. They can use this force for good such as coping with imbalences in the market - thousands upon thousands of immigrants who could not speak english, and all competing for the tiny number of jobs they were actually capable of doing. But they can also use the force to strong-arm the market however they want,
    • My is this news for nerds? Aren't most porn actors and sock puppets non-union anyway?
  • From TFA Sub-Heading: Creative Commons is new licensing scheme
  • The boing-boing isn't clear if this is part of the press release or not, but I quote: "Mash-up and re-mix potential is an intrinsic part of the Sanctuary project empowering the audience to exercise greater control over purchased film content and treating re-use as an opportunity as opposed to a threat."

    And how is that bad, exactly?

  • Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:00PM (#11947922) Homepage Journal
    The part I dislike the most about the Creative Commons set of licenses is the advocation of non-commercial restrictions, as if they were a good idea. This thoroughly reduces the distribution of the work. 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. It means that only people who contact you directly can use your icon set. That's hardly freedom.

    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)

      by Da_Biz ( 267075 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:07PM (#11947979)
      I disagree. I've written several prose pieces where I have used Creative Commons to limit how it's used. As the creator and copyright holder of the piece, I believe I have the right to say how it's used.

      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/2.0

      • Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Insightful)

        by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @08:16PM (#11948648) Journal
        I believe I have the right to say how it's used.

        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.
      • I think there's a misunderstanding.

        We (royal) are okay with what you want, and what you are doing.

        What is difficult is the situation where a person wants to contribute their work for general public use. This isn't like your (legitimate) case, this is a different (legitimate) case.

        In they're head, they are thinking, "Hey! This is great! People who are doing non-commercial stuff can use. Like, if someone's making a Free Software video game, they can reuse it. So this helps all those net projects. And then
    • 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. It means that only people who contact you directly can use your icon set. That's hardly freedom.

      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
      • Yeah, as I said, it's not freedom. It's not a hard thing to grasp here, if you have to ask for permission then it's not free for that use. It's good that you've released your work for non-commercial use, but commercial use is also important. Advocating that people release their work for non-commercial use when there's no real reason to is silly.
        • Geez, dude, this is not that hard to understand. My music is released under a Creative Commons "No Commercial" use clause because I don't want anyone making money from it. If someone really has a boner to release it and make money off of it, they can talk to me about it.

          I'll probably tell them no, but who knows?

          And if there's something I want to release commercially, I'll simply leave the "Non-Commerical" part out of it. See? Not that hard.

          Now if you've got a problem with me not wanting to allow
          • Yeah I do. Cause if another musician who happens to consider the Creative Commons to be a good thing makes a derivative work of your song and then gets asked if his song can be used in an advertisement he's going to have to track you down and ask permission. Now you might say that is a good thing, but what happens if the pot has been stirred a hell of a lot more than just once? We already live in a permission based society when it comes to music. The Creative Commons is supposed to be about removing tho
            • 1. You don't get the point of the Creative Commons licenses...they're about giving users AND content creators new freedoms. And I'm looking at this in a much different light as a creator than you are as a user. There are freedoms as a user that you may like to have, but as a creator I choose not to give them to you.

              2. You haven't read the terms of the Creative Commons licenses. If you had, you would know that they're not necessarily about removing restrictions, but about giving content creators optio
        • as I said, it's not freedom.

          Except that it *is* freedom.

          if you have to ask for permission then it's not free

          Well, people aren't allowed to murder one another. Or steal. Or rape and pillage. Therefore nobody is free.

      • It's freedom for you to make your own choice about wether you wish to have your icons included in the distribution [...]

        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]

    • One other thing that I don't like so much is that attribution is now included in every license. Granted, I mostly license my music under a solely attribution license. For other works, however, I might want to have the option of only NoDerivs.

      Also on the topic of over-restrictions, I've noticed that lots of people, especially when first getting into CC, pick the biggest combination of restrictions possible. This makes using their works more difficult than it should be and almost seems like they're saying th
    • Well honestly you don't want every joe blow calling you waisting your time. But how hard is it for a corperation to call you up and say "Hi, we'd like to use your icons?".

    • Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons (Score:5, Interesting)

      by schon ( 31600 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:16PM (#11948069)
      the advocation of non-commercial restrictions, as if they were a good idea.

      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.

      • 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.

        RedHat, I know has a policy that essentially everything they include in their base distro *MUST* be a certain type of free, with only two exceptions. The RedHat Logos, and some Anaconda images files (I'd have to double check anaconda package name, but essentially it's some images they used during the install p

        • You are using different standards of freedom from the parent poster

          True enough.

          and then saying he doesn't understand the definition of "freedom"

          Please show me where I said that. Nowhere in that post did I ever say that he didn't understand the definition of "freedom."

          It's a silly argument to make.

          Yes, and it was done to illustrate a point.

          He's correct in saying that releasing it under a "Non-Commercial Use" license isn't meeting nearly anyones definition of free

          No, he's not. It meets *lots*
      • (Or, why is it such a big deal if they have to contact me first?)

        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
        • it's not worth it to them

          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..." ...and then they move on, and the artist never even knew.

          Except that it doesn't actually happen that way. If a company wants to distribute some
          • Except that it doesn't actually happen that way. If a company wants to distribute something enough, they *will* ask.

            Nonono-

            You don't understand-

            You're talking about taking photographs, and then putting them online. If some magazine wants to use them, they pay you. Fair enough: The CC license with non-commercial is okay.

            But that's totally different than the icons scenario. Here's why.

            Let's say you have some icons for some GNOME project. Now lets say this little project wants to be in the GNOME distribu
    • I agree completely. As you say, it's just annoying that they act like a non-commercial restriction is a good idea.

      My utter bafflement, though, is that in the 2.0 licenses they don't have a no-attrib option. Why? WTF? That means that as far as I can tell, none of the CC 2.0 licenses are GPL compatible. I'm sure they had a reason, but I'll be damned if I can figure it out.
  • I've got a couple of papers (nothing professional, mind you, just short grad school papers on the use of open source technologies in public libraries) and a short story all licensed under a Creative Commons License.

    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)

    by Stumbles ( 602007 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:11PM (#11948022)
    has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions.

    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)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      to paraphrase, "I/We forbid you to do any work that does not make us money."

      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

  • MEAA? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ta bu shi da yu ( 687699 )
    Are they an important part of Australian film making? And if so, isn't this restraint of trade?
  • Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, EMI and Warner Music Group, for instance, inked deals to distribute songs on a fee-based download service run by Wurld Media, a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., peer-to-peer software company.

    Does anyone else think these guys made a serious typo in their Articles of Incorporation and couldn't be bothered to fix it?

  • Seriously, people need to start pushing the idea of the Creative Commons licenses to webcomic artists out there. My own comic (link above) is CC-BY-NC-SA. I figure that this sort of license is a whole lot better than me trying to come up with my own sans lawyer, and the 'noncommercial' bit would preclude most of the stuff you would be worried about (people printing your comic in books in an unauthorized manner, or sticking up your comic with ads on some site you don't want them to...)

    And if you're really

  • Can someone please tell me why they are doing this without going into conspiracy theories/nonsense?
  • And the award for burying their head in the sand and hoping that reality goes away goes to ... MEAA.

    Seriously, if the actors know going into this what will be done, and are being paid a fair wage to appear, where's the beef? Name actors appear in indie films all the time in Australia, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes for no pay at all. How is this different?

  • Suggestion (Score:3, Informative)

    by ta bu shi da yu ( 687699 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @07:18PM (#11948084) Homepage
    There is an email form to register your disgust [alliance.org.au].

  • I'm withholding opinion (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sfjoe ( 470510 )

    I'd like to get this story from a source that's not named "Boing Boing" and doesn't use words like "sez" in their articles. Even Fox News would be a better source of information. Maybe.

  • "The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be "inappropriate."

    Then the actors said they could grant none of the wishes sought by the MEAA Board, on the grounds that these would be "inappropriate."

    Or at least I hope that what some of them say, though I don't know how hard that might hit them in the wallet. Look, the future is coming, and the MEAA can either join the 21st-century, or they can fade into irrelevance. Their cho

  • If everyone switches to creative commons, I'll never pay a cent for a movie or for music again. That's the economics of it for me.
  • 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.'

    I'm sure I don't have the correct terminology, but in the USA independent productions (i.e. very little, if any pay) can get exemptions from SAG which allow union actors to officially work on the project - I guess there are still some min

  • Artitsts? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by k-zed ( 92087 ) on Wednesday March 16, 2005 @03:28AM (#11951252) Homepage Journal
    According to quite a number of articles here and on The Register, most (true) artists, authors and musicians were never really against file-sharing - it helps by spreading their work, lets more people experience their talent. It's just the traditional media company that doesn't like it's N-approaches-infinity percent profit margin diminished.
  • Please read through this before flaming away, and I'm not here trying to advocate that the MEAA is doing the right thing, but there is a point of view that has not been expressed yet here on /.

    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.

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