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A Critique of the EFF's Open Audio License
In fact, let me make a brief response to Glass' points as he makes them in the critique -
OAL gives away too much: No response to this. It's for the artist to decide.
No credit to performer: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. The performer is free to seek an alternate license from the author if he/she wants to profit off of the song.
Potential damage to reputation: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. Like the GPL, this license assumes that free and open should be free and open to everyone for every purpose, even those you find distasteful. "Oh my god, someone is using my GPL'ed program called grep to search for abortion providers in the phone book!"
Viral nature: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. Again, if you want to incorporate chunks of someone else's work in your own, you are free to a) be infected by the OAL, or b) seek a different license from the author. Free with restrictions, or, presumably, pay the author for a different deal. Without this license, only b) is available. The OAL only ever provides a possible alternative for people wanting to use a work.
ASCAP and BMI don't enforce the OAL: This is an issue to take up with ASCAP or BMI.
Irrevocable: Silly criticism. Even without this clause, you couldn't "take back" the license, at least for people who've already made use of your work - they took advantage of the license at the time.
Most of the rest of Glass' criticisms are general criticisms of any Free license - it gives away the rights of the author. Well, duh, that's what it's supposed to do. These are criticisms of the aim of the license rather than flaws in the license. What Glass is lacking here is a general BSD-type license for music to compare this against...
It is about time. I make music with various trackers and midi crap. I give the music away. Anyone who remembers the old Amiga mod scene should welcome such. Take a look at some free music: www.kosmic.org (they've done it all. from 2 channel mods to 32 channel xm's released in mp3 format. These guys rock. Too bad I can't find old Future Crew releases)
This is our answer to the big music companies that want to revoke our rights. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'll find my music elsewhere.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I'm probably going to get modded to hell for this but I'm going to ask it anyway: Who is Brett Glass and why should anyone care if he disagrees with an artist's choosing to release music under some kind of open license? Is he "somebody" in the music industry? A RIAA hack? An (unknown to me) artist? What interests does he really represent?
You're using her as bait, Master!
The guy who wrote Free for All had a long explanation about why the book wasn't free. He points out that text and opinions are best copyrighted because copyright doesn't affect the facts themselves. If you want to reuse the facts, you're free to do so. You just can't reuse the exact form.
But music is kind of different. Songs do grow as other people add stanzas, verses and what not. So I can see the advantages of the OAL. This guy is complaining too much. Sure, you give up some rights when you use it, but you gain others. What's the big deal? Everything in life has tradeoffs.
Brett would prefer if we'd all put out free media that he can take private, commercialize, and not return anything to the creator. I just don't see what's in it for anyone but Brett. Most people don't take him seriously.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
faq about oal here.
interesting discussion on list group here.
radio station on live365 playing OAL here.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
i am a musician, and in a band. I do want to be paid for my music, and I want copyright restrictions, i don't want people to obtain free copies of my work. Why? because I want money. Think of it this way, serious bands need money, because they devote all their time to making music, If my band could do that, we'd be much more productive. Oh sure you could cry that the bands are too rich, well that's the select few that are major bands.
When you buy an album forget that your paying the RIAA tax, your supporting a band that you love. This does nto mean you should let down the fight against the opressive RIAA and their tactics, but don't let hte music be the casualty in this world. Bands are poor, bands need as much money as they can get to perpetuate themselves unless they don't mind working a dayjob.
Photos.
Here.
You can browse the music that's up there already, download it, whatever. I've got a few songs up there, give them a listen.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
good starting point for a license for music?
Yes.
We, at GNUArt, directly use the GPL to protect Art.
After discussing it with RMS, we agreed it would be possible:
Lots of artists trust us, just browse our gallery for free "GNU" Art...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Judging from the critique (I'm yet to read the license itself), the OAL would prevent them from selling CDs.
THe most important critisizm of the OAL in that article is the whole issues of covers. Even with the GPL, each contributors efforts is acknowledge (They do, after all, retain copyright). That doesn't happen with OAL (apparently).
Let's say, for example, that composer X writes a song with good lyrics, but a really bad melody. performer Y comes along, keeps the lyrics but writes a much better harmony for the song (take Machineheads cover of 'Message In A Bottle' as an example, not that there's anything wrong with original, I just prefer the cover myself). According to the critique, performer Y would get no credit for the song, but composer X might earn shitloads of money from the popularity of the new version.
That is a major flaw with the license...
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
Some of Glass' critiques seem a little silly - they're intended goals of the license, not flaws.
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
To claim that a critique is "silly" because you disagree with the author's point of view is rather condescending, and does not contribute to meaningful debate. Is the purpose of this license to create a moral imperative to release music for free (much as RMS uses GNU as a platform to argue the immorality of commercial software)? If so, the issues Glass raises merit serious discussion.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Agreed. Here's a bit by Brett in which he lays out his views on the GPL ("The GPL ... was designed explicitly to hurt programmers' livelihoods.") and Stallman (who "says that good wages for programmers should be 'banned.'")
From the summary of the critique(the page is slashdotted so I didn't read it) it sounds like the critique is not about the method of sharing, but, rather, about the sharing itself. If you don't want to share your stuff--don't. Just don't tell other people that they can't, or shouldn't.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Well, if Glass is correct in his summary, then I would have to say that the very first bullet point:
represents a fatal flaw. This would imply that you could not release a "teaser" MP3 , say one ripped in a lower audio quality, and still retain your other copyrights to the song. That seems shortsighted and unfair.
So, to use a software analogy, Red Hat and Mandrake are performances of the work Linux. Well, does Mandrake really trumpet the fact that it?s Red Hat based? Not really anymore. Does Red Hat actively recognize Mandrake's contributions to popularizing linux? No. Do both distributions include proper credit to the authors of their content? Yes.
:-)> . (Beginners should try anything from '77 or '78. That's Gerry Garcia on lead guitar, BTW.)
I think the OAL is more about song writers than performers. I do not believe that a performer could release a conventionally copyrighted song under the OAL. This would probably be a copyright violation because no royalty would be paid to the work's owner under the original copyright. On the other hand, if Willie Nelson had released "Crazy" under something like the OAL, then he would be associated with the work, not Patsy Cline.
Ultimately, though, songwriters make money on royalties. I don't see how they can do this under the OAL, so I don't think it has a chance for any group or artist that relies on album sales. For those that rely on performance revenue (like the Grateful Dead), the the license would make perfect sense, because it would promote distribution of the performance recordings and create new consumers. For example, I always thought the Grateful Dead were about a hippie drug culture until I downloaded and burned a concert for a fried and discovered that they were a really, really good performance band. I would have never discovered this if they had not given away the rights to record their concerts.
So, in the interest of spreading the love
I think it is obvious that this license is not for everyone. Just like the GPL (ducks a swing from RMS). I both write software and record music.
If my music is, for example, written for a game or a web site or something where the music is basically ancillary to the main part of the entire work then I would have no problem releasing the audio under the OAL. However when the audio is the main part then I do not want that audio taken and molested by anyone who wants to harm it.
When I write a song at 2 am with my guitar it is very spiritual. I don't sing mathematical truths or other factual data, I sing a unique interpretation of my life as I have experienced it. This song is not something that anyone else can understand the same way I do. Other people may be able to identify with it and share some common ground, but no one can truly feel the same way I did when I recorded it - if they did then they would have mysteriously written the exact same song.
I want to keep these songs mine, like journal entries, as a collection of memories. I don't want some teenager with a eukalalie recording a modified version of my memory.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Here is a short critique of Glass's article:
Glass uses ad hominem attacks against John Perry Barlow, but fails to instruct us in any way as to why Brett Glass is any more credible than John Perry Barlow- in fact Glass strongly urges that anyone looking for legal advice regarding this legal license look elsewhere.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
As far as I know, music is sold today without any license agreement of any kind.
True, but keep in mind, the record company's "licenses" are passed as laws. The things you are allowed to do and not do, the Audio Home Recording Act, the DMCA, much of that could be placed in a license spelling out exactly what you're allowed to do.
The RIAA, etc, don't need to make licenses, they just pass the laws they need, and save a lot of trouble.
Software has been a little different because the software monopolies (Microsoft, in other words) haven't been paying much attention to Washington. Just wait until they figure out how to lobby with the efficiency of the record labels, your next MS software might contain no license agreement, since the terms Microsoft likes will be part of copyright law.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I'll ever release my music under this license. Why not?
grants the worldwide public permission to:
Modification
This means, you can mess my song up and release it under the same name. Like hell you can. Remix it if you must and release it under your own name, but don't make me responsible for what you do to it.
Note that this clause isn't saying the same thing as: you have the right to sample from this track and create a new track from the samples you've made - under your own name, which I'd have no problems with (unless people start sampling complete riffs, which isn't quite my taste), it's saying "redo a track released under this license any way you see fit and then release it as a "fork" of said track." This may be fine for software, but music has a very different dynamic, which I think the EFF people are forgetting. Artist + Track of which integrity has been preserved are much more important in music than it is in software.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
The most telling example for me is busybox, an embedded Linux toolkit that I created in 1996, which is a critical part of most of embedded Linux systems. Lineo took that toolkit into their product, as have most of the other embedded Linux companies. It gave them a time-to-market advantage. But because it was under the GPL, all of the various companies (especially Lineo) that improved Busybox contributed their work back under the GPL, and it's now about 5 times as functional as what I released, and everybody profits from that functionality. If I had used the BSD license, they would all have made their own improvements, duplicating effort, and keeping them proprietary, and fewer would have the benefit of that product, and the public version would still just be the 1/5 that I wrote. That's how a lot of non-GPL products have gone in the embedded market.
Thus, I think sharing works better than a handout.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
If that's the way you feel, then this license is not for you. However, for people who care solely about the art, this license is great.
The free exchange of ideas in classical music led to some great artistic achievements that would not have occurred had strict, modern copyright laws been in place then. For instance, when JS Bach was young, he left his job as a church organist and walked 200 miles (no internet in those days :^) ) so that he could hear the music of Dietrich Buxtehude. He ended up staying several months, studying and transcribing as much of Buxtehude's music as he could. This had a profound influence on Bach's development as a composer. I shudder to think about how Western music would have been affected if Buxtehude, worried about retaining credit for his work, sicked some IP lawyers on Bach and forced him to go away. It is ironic that today, Buxtehude is mostly remembered because of the transcriptions that Bach made. If he had sought to protect his reputation, he probably would have vanished into history by now.
Similarly, Bach may have vanished as well had not a small number of 19th century composers such as Felix Mendelssohn rescued him from obscurity. Though long dead, Bach has mainly remained famous through the interest of other musicians who want to reinterpret his music. My favorite example of this is Bach's Chaccone in D Minor for violin, which has been arranged for piano by Johannes Brahms and for guitar by Andres Segovia, as well as several others. These three versions are all sublime pieces of music, yet only one of them would exist if the current copyright laws existed then. These are not isolated occurences, I could go on for ages about all of the pieces with names like "Variations on a Theme by Some Other Composer", but I think you get the idea.
Anyway, to reiterate my point, fiercely guarding credit for the music you create may not be the best way to establish your reputation. Using this license is not likely to damage anyone's standing as an artist. However, if one only wants to make money off of their music, the OAL may not be a good idea, but the indusrty standard way of doing things hasn't exactly lined the pockets of many musicians either.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
People just don't understand. I don't mean they don't see it my way- I really mean they don't understand. Most people have never had a serious discussion about property rights and the way that the government grants monopolies to creators with the stated goal of fostering innovation.
Another more pithy way to put it is this: We don't subsidize the pony express now that mechanical transportation is available.
The bottom line is scarcity. gnovos is trying to say that some people think it's the talent that's scarce even if copies of their works are free, but that people are wrong and talent is not in fact scarce. This is basically right on the money. If talent *is* scarce, then the music industry needs to find ways to reward talent that make sense, like charging for live performances and other things that can't happen without talent, rather than trying to jealously contain free copies of recordings.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
In July 2000, at the H2K conference in New York (2600's Hope conference), Jello Biafra gave the keynote speech. Later that day, he sat on a panel about intellectual property.
He suggested there should be something like an "equal exchange" for artists (equal exchange is the organization that, among other things, makes sure people are being paid fairly to grow coffee). This seems pretty close to the OAL idea from the EFF. It's definitely an idea whose time has come (even though the GNU Artistic License, and other licenses, have been available for years).
On a side note, Jello was/is really pissed that his Vegas song got used in a car ad. He fought a long and very costly legal battle with the rest of the Dead Kennedys, and lost. He wrote the song, but in the end did not control its destiny.
On a side side note, there's a new Dead Kennedys album of live takes from the bay area. It's fantastic! Sorry I don't recall the title right now...
You also probably signed an agreement when you took your job that released your copyright and designated your creative output as "works for hire". That's great for you! Unfortunately, there are many, many fewer businesses willing to pay a salary for a in-house composer to write music works for hire. Just because you signed away your copyright doesn't mean all programmers do. I know at least one former coworker that signed a deal where he retained rights to all his work.
"You on the other hand are only asked to create art for a few hours every so often. "
This is patently false. Most composers are not asked to create their art. They create it and then try to sell it. In circumstances where this doesn't obtain (recording contract, commissioned work), meeting the demands of the request for music is no less arduous than programming (don't try to tell me otherwise; I've done both). Even writing a decent 3 minute pop song is hard work. Much like programming, music does not spring fully formed from a wellspring of creativity. It requires practice (education), good basic themes (design), and editing (debugging). And, if you try it live, unlike programming, you have to be able to reproduce it in real time. Also, unlike programming, it's hard to find someone to compensate you for that time.
My fundamental objection to your argument has to do with your contempt for musicians and the difficulty they face. How many people write/play music as a day job to support their dreams of being a programmer? How many do the reverse?
Many people are satisfied to play music as a hobby, for friends or family, or take the occasional weekend warrior gig. For these people, something like the OAL is great. That's fine. Many devote their lives to it, hoping against hope that they'll be able to eke out a meager living. For these people, it would be insane to release under such a license. A statistically insignificant number make piles upon piles of money (though not NEARLY as much as their labels make off of them). For these lucky few, we can hope that they understand that their fans want the joy of sharing the music with their friends, a la the Grateful Dead. The real fact of the matter is that without musicians in the 2nd and 3rd categories, you wouldn't have anything decent to do while you hack away. So don't be a fucking ingrate, dig?
I do heartily agree with you that everyone is talented, and everyone is an artist. But we all have different talents in different quantities, and talent without hard work is worthless. Hard work takes time, and if you don't get compensated for that time, you don't eat.
There's no free lunch. Even authors of GPL software are getting money from someone for doing something, or they'd starve.
Brett, I've done a google search on the terms 'Brett Glass GPL' and found a great deal, as you can imagine. I've actually spent a couple of hours reading your various attacks against the GPL in a variety of forums over the last couple of years.
You tend to make a few points that are worth considering, but the value of those points tend to be diluted by your hatred of the GPL, and the lengths to which you will go to attack it and anyone who supports it. Declaring that people who use the GPL are either morons who don't know their own self interest or evil sons of bitches who want to hurt others is not helpful. Describing the GPL as not being an Open Source license due to the discrimination clause when the authors of said license explicitly wrote the Open Source terms to encompass the GPL also does not make you seem like you are interested in listening to anything anyone else has to say on the matter.
The GPL is a mechanism to implement a social contract, where programmers put their software under the GPL to ensure that said software can have continued relevence and utility in the network effect economy of the software world. The value in software is, as you know, not intrinsic to the bits. Microsoft paid $50,000 for QDOS and made untold billions off of it. The reason they did is because DOS became the standard of compatibility for all the software made for the IBM PC, not because DOS was particularly well made. In a winner-take-all software market, what can programmers do if they want to have a piece of software be available for public use and public evolution, without worrying about a bad actor doing as Microsoft did with the Kerberos standard in Windows 2000 and taking a public program or specification private and then using network effects to freeze out other usage?
The GPL is a license of one's own work to the public under specified terms. You seem to think that it is unfair that programmers may not take GPL'ed work and then do anything they like with it, but the same could be said of any commercial license. If you or anyone else wants to create something with functionality similar to a GPL'ed product but under non-GPL'ed terms, then you can very well go off and write it yourself, the old fashioned way. If the labor of others, available under the GPL, makes it hard for you to make a living creating similar work, then that's too bad. That's competition. Those programmers working under the GPL have sacrificed much (as you like to point out) to release their software in that way.
There are a lot of reasons not to use the GPL, even for publicly distributable software. There are many kinds of software that would have better effect and influence if they were to be released under a BSD or Apache style license. That's a debate worth having. But claiming that the GPL is evil, as you do, is unconvincing unless you would claim that any kind of restrictions placed on you for the use of someone else's property is evil. If you want to write commercial software, do like everyone else does and write it yourself, or pay to license it from someone else.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX