Lessig Proposes "Creative Commons"

cmuncey writes: "Lawrence Lessig's newest effort is profiled this morning in a SFGate.com article this morning. Creative Commons will offer customizable flexible intellectual property licenses that can be used by artists, writers, and others in moving their works from copyright to public domain in a controlled manner. The aricle also cites plans to create a 'conservancy' for what looks like orphanware. This is a joint work of Lessig and people from MIT, Duke, Harvard and Villanova."

Why bother???

[Ars-Fartsica]

IP holders aren't interested in any of these proposals. They're only interested in dichotomizing the world into customers who are gouged, and pirates who are prosecuted.

What is their motivation for changing their licensing?? You can argue that a flexible license would reduce piracy, but frankly these compaies are already doing a good job of shutting down major piracy services. I just don't see any motivation for change.

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[paulbd]

and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders actually, not quite. when your corporation was given its charter, there was an implication that it was given for the good of the public. presumably, your corporation was likely to perform some public good, in return for which we (the public) decided to remove personal responsibility from the company owners and controllers. you therefore have a primary duty to perform a public good, and if you cease to do so, we should remove your corporate charter and allow you to act as privately owned business with full financial and legal culpability. once you make it clear your corporation is living up to the charter, then you can focus on the secondary duties towards your shareholders.

Licenses-R-Us

[imadork]

So, it sounds like the plan here is to make a web site where you fill out a form stating how much control you want to keep over your creative work, and you can print out a license tailored to your needs. Am I getting that right?

IF I am, it seems that these licenses will not have been tested in court. So how useful are they? Will you put your exciting Foo Application in the Commons, only to see BigSoftCorp take it when the license is proved invalid by a technicality?

Not to mention, will the OSF feel the need to approve or dis-approve every single possible combination?

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[elfkicker]

Good points. I think you can make a pretty simple case for both questions.

1) You've reached a point where you cannot profit from that property any longer. By releasing it, you allow other people to use it, and perhaps create a new market for that property. This can be beneficial because you are already the formost expert on the property if new profitable opportunities come up. You may alos have the option of entering back into the game with duel licensing.

2) Seems like every peice of software I've ever used disclaims liability right up front. I think the courts would be even more understanding if you're giving it away. You get what you pay for sometimes.

I personally see little reason in not opening up your IP once you're done with it. Normally by the time you'd want to, the cat is out of the bag and there's very little secret. Just holding it hostage for the abaility to sue infringers seems like a rather weak plan to me.

A useful contribution that hurts no one

[volts]

While there are aspects of Creative Commons agenda that push the envelope of achievability, a well organized set of free license agreements, is a nice concept.

An artist might, for example, agree to give away a work as long as no one is making money on it but include a provision requiring payments on a sliding scale if it's sold. As participation in the Commons project increases, a variety of specific intellectual-property license options will evolve in response to user needs, which in turn would create templates for others with similar requirements.

Within a few months, artists, writers and others will soon be able to go online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made license they can append to their works without having to pay a dime to a lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase similar legal services.

A consistent set of licenses that cover the objectives of GPL, LGPL, Berkely, Artistic, etc. and other points on the spectrum to fully commercial would be a great benefit to us all.

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax write-offs could become the answer to how value returns to shareholders.

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[neuroticia]

Hm.

(note: "we" is in the figurative sense. In fact, I am a no one.)

Your "questions" are not the potential pitfalls that I see:

Regarding payment: your source, as you said is no longer making money for you. It is not a valuable resource to you, and to "us" it's along the lines of old clothing donated to the Salvation Army. We might be able to do something with it, we might not. Personally, I think the govermnent should offer tax breaks to the "donors" of source code to the public domain. (This, of course, brings about the potential of fraudulent source code, questions about the 'value' of the source and how to measure it... etc.)

Regarding liability--Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see that many lawsuits regarding opensource or public domain software. In fact, the only lawsuits regarding software that I can think of off the top of my head involve commercial software with fairly restrictive licensing agreements. Isn't it a common "term of agreement" that open source and public domain software is largely "use at your own risk"?

There *are* other questions that would be harder to answer, but I just can't think of them right now. It's 12:16 in the afternoon and I need sleep.

-Sara

Existing licenses, the two books, cooperation ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There already are a number of free licenses in use. It's hard to tell from this plan, but does he intend to just ignore these licenses? What about all the works already published with them? And it sounds like this could turn into a sloppy mess if you let people select options to make a "custom license" - I mean, what about compatibility? If everybody's got their own license, you can't combine anything anymore! Or is he saying that the licenses and methods currently being put to use just aren't good enough? Will he make a Foundation like FSF but for music or other things?

So these are big red flags that sprang to mind upon my initial reading. It sounds too much like a PR stunt, trying to reinvent the wheel. If Lessig works with the others, well OK. But if it ignores existing work, I would not trust it. The point is that people should work together, not try to out do one another. (Did the FSF do this too?)

Also I noticed his two published books are not public domain, open source, free, or copyleft. What's up with that? Again, what is the motive? Why not walk the walk you talk??

(Please mod up, I'm anon this post...)

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[paulbd]

Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money this is a common misconception. people may decide to form a corporation for the sole purpose of making money, but people cannot create a corporation without the agreement of the state. the state agrees to remove personal and legal financial responsibility from the owners because it is convinced that the public good will be served by so doing (e.g. that the company will accomplish things, offer services etc. that it would not without this legal allowance). without a corporate charter, company owners are legal liable for all actions of their company, which is generally considered to be a bit restricting on what they may consider doing. so, no, corporations do not exist for the sole purpose of making money. they exist because at some point in the past, people decided it was in the public interest to allow them to exist. if a corporation's existence does not serve the public interest, then it is entirely legal to retract its charter. that this is rarely done says more about politics than anything else.

That's another whole problem

[drew_kime]

protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.

The fact that our current legal system does nothing to discourage frivolous lawsuits is the real problem here. I agree that it will be raised, and that it is a fact of life. But that's not a problem with copyright law, it's a problem with tort law.

Orphanware should be left to die

[Lord Hugh Toppingham]

I think that software which nobody is interested in should be allowed to die gracefully. I think there is little future generations can learn from the kind of spaghetti code that was commonly produced in the 80s and 90s before OOP became the dominant paradigm.

Why make future generations suffer ?

Tragedy of the creative commons

[argoff]

I don't mean to flame, but I think he's in denial. It does not look at what's going on from a pragmatic point of view. There are people out there who actually think that leveraging intellectual properties to their extremes are what the internet and the information age is all about. (Sort of aken to the days of those who thought that the industrial revolution was all about leveraging inventions like the cotton-gyn to extend their plantations to be thousands of times bigger) They were/are simply so dilusioned that we can almost be assured that there will be no compromizing till the bitter end.

As long as this attitude is in place we will continue to have DMCA pushers, and they will not back off on their irrational demands that all information be treated like peoperty. To come back with an attitude of compromize is pitifull. The only honest solution is defiance and civil disobedience of copyrights till people start to get it and can no longer afford to keep shoving irrational demands down our throats.

I happen to know that Lessing does not like this approach because he contends that it's extreme and that it won't get sympathy because it's "harmfull" to artists, but no one ever seems to look at the down-side of copyrights or they just assume on faith that it's less than the up-side. Well it's not about sympathy, society will come arround when the media runs out of money. It's about freedom, and how I have a moral right to apply it to my and other's benefit even if a copyright holder does not like that. There is no reason why people shouldn't act this way, and now with the internet they have the power to without having to get token permission or to purchase token licenses.
This is far more respective of creators then the copyright lords have ever been to them or us.

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[NumberSyx]

people decided it was in the public interest to allow them to exist.

This is true at least in theory, but in reality many companies act in thier own self interest. To stay on topic, I will give Disney as an example. How does keeping the Mikey Mouse IP locked up for another 20 years serve the public good ? The only reason they do it is to make more money. Releasing Mikey would serve the public, because then other artists could do thier own takes on him or Non-Profit organizations could use him as an icon.

Re:Tragedy of the creative commons

[mwa]

What you say is true, today, because the "IP holders" are middle-men. The buy IP rights from the IP creators and sell them. Lessig is promoting a program where the real IP creators, the artists and inventors, have a chance to regain some degree of control over their work.

The idea of the Internet as a public commons is anathema to the DMCA supporters because, with a global network of free distribution, their business model is dead. In order to survive they must protect their model with legislation, or adapt. Coporations do not adapt well to change.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lessig's program, because it could prove to be an industry self-help program that can help them adapt, reduce their reliance on legislation and strong-arm tactics, and still provide value to their customers and shareholders.

Hey, I can dream can't I?

Ain't no tragedy when the supply is limitless...

[maynard]

One of the central points behind Tragedy of the Commons [dieoff.org] is that given a finite supply of grazing grounds and a competitive environment of farmers grazing on these grounds, an incentive to overgraze is built into the system. Thus the commons for all are destroyed as each farmer maximizes his "share" of the commons to everyone else's detriment. Hardin's essay leaves out the potential for ad-hoc agreement between competing farmers to limit over-use of the commons (without privatization). But most importantly it doesn't even consider the potential for a limitless commons -- that is, one in which the supply in commons is not finite.

This is where Tragedy of the Commons breaks down, Lessig says in The Future of Ideas [amazon.com], his latest work. As Lessig points out, it's a logical fallacy to use Tragedy of the Commons as an analogy to further certain intellectual property rights since there is no limit to the number of times some kinds of IP can be duplicated and distributed. Being a physical object, grass in a commons is in finite supply and subject to the potential for overgrazing. But without artificial barriers (such as copy protection technology) how can one ever over consume to scarcity the supply of digital data such as a software program?

Interesting book.

Cheers,
--Maynard

Re:Real Value vs. Perceived Value

[Bonker]

YOU, the consumer, are not the sole arbiter of what a reasonable sale price is.

Uhm... Yes I am.

Have you ever heard of the laws of supply and demand? If you didn't sleep through highschool economics or miss out seeing the graphics, you know that the higher the (consumer) demand for any given saleable object, the higher the price the originator or merchant can sell it for.

There is zero real demand for Donkey Kong roms at any non-zero price. Therefore, Midway cannot reasonably sell those roms for a profit.

Ergo, the price... legitimate or otherwise... is $0

A lot of black market economies work on this principle. A token amount is paid for a desirable, but basically valueless or disposable item that is for some reason difficult or illegal to obtain.

Re:Devil's advocate ?s from corporate masters:

[paulbd]

i don't have a reference for you i'm afraid. i know that when corporate charters were introduced into english law under Charles (the second, i believe), this notion of public good was explicit. the US did not have corporate charters from the beginning, partly because the king didn't want to grant them, and then later because the founders were unsure of the appropriateness of it. i have read some works from that time that express a believe that limited liability was immoral. it is possible that when the US finally adopted the idea of limited liability via corporations, the whole sense that there was an exchange between the broader society and the organization was never codified into law. it was certainly present in the discussions of the idea that predated its adoption into law. if you step back and think about it, however, there is some sense in which the understanding is explicit: there is no earthly reason why the state would grant you with limited liability unless it believed it was in its best interest to do so. since granting it actually removes certain potential benefits to the state (via legal action), there must presumably be some reason why the charter was issued. US society has not always believed that limited liability companies were a good thing - presumably we do now, and whatever the reason, it presumably implies a belief the the LLC's existence will bring benefits to us all.

Re:Why bother???

[jat2]

That may be true for companies that hold IP (and, from reading other comments, that is a debatable point). However, consider that a large amount of IP is produced by individuals.

For example, a friend of mine is an aspiring film-maker. His primary goal is exposure, and he understands that releasing his IP (in this case, a film) into the public domain will give him an opportunity to increase his exposure cheaply. However, he would like to retain some of the conditions of his copyright. (If he did release his film into the public domain, then he may not have any legal options if a studio decided to rip off his idea without even giving him credit.)

I can easily imagine that many artists would have a similar use for a spectrum of license options between 100% restricted and 100% public domain. Furthermore, Lessig's idea about embedding the license into the digital media makes this more attractive to someone like my friend.