Slashdot Mirror
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."
There's an .pdf article with some interesting ideas linked to this at Lessig's site - Reclaiming a Commons
What do you have to offer us to:
- pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
- protect us from liability should anyone manage to damage themselves or their own companies with the product you want us to give away.
Unfortunately, there aren't easy answers to those objections. The answer isn't some kind of volunatry feel-good way to have corporations give to the public domain, because it's not going to happen. The answer is to make copyright for a "limited time," as the framers intended. Not for 95 years when 5 years is an eternity in <cliche>Internet time<cliche>.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
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.
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?
I bet they'll be paying particular attention to creating fine print that says, "use our licenses at your own risk."
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
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.
pay us for what you want--it must have value since you want it in the public domain, and it's our duty to extract that value for our shareholders.
The problem with this argument... and the fallacy that so many corporate types fall for is that value is not an absolute.
Case in point... I am a PC owner who has aquired a Motorola processor for an older Mac. I *could* spend my money and try to build a system around that processor, but I'd rather spend it on a newer system with with an AMD processor.
I could try to sell it to a mac-owner, but most Mac ownwers are used to spending a little more on hardware than PC owners. Most probably will never have a use for my processor.
The one person who does have a use for my processor is the poor kid who's managed to scrounge, beg, and borrow all the parts necessary to build a Macintosh Quadra-era PC, but lacks a processor to make it run. (This exmple may be flawed...)
The point is, the processor only has value to someone who can't afford to buy it. It doesn't have value to anyone who could afford to buy it because they can already afford better, just because the tech has advanced so far so quickly.
The same is true of 'orphanware' and 'abandonware'. I would never seriously consider paying to have a Donkey Kong arcade machine. It's old, clunky, and probably smells of whatever bar or grease-pit it's been rotting in for the last 2 decades. I highly doubt that Midway has sold any to anyone but the most rabid of collectors in at least a decade.
To download the rom for free, (and illegally), gives me a great deal of satisfaction playing a old, great game I would not otherwise ever engage in.
While the hardware and software combination may have a small amount of value to collectors, the software itself has no value at all, except to those who wouldn't have it unless they could get it for free.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If you haven't read it already, check out Lessig's ten questions from December.
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...)
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.
Nope, no sig
So the poor, Starving Artist picks out the Creative Commons license that meets her need. For the moment, assume the license is ironclad. Then, mean old Megacorp comes along and steals Starving Artist's work. How is she going to enforce her license? Will Creative Commons maintain a staff of lawyers to work license infringment cases pro-bono? Do we trust that lawyers will take these cases on a contingency fee basis?
Unless there's some answer, the license won't mean much. Lessig is a very smart guy. It will be interesting to see his full proposal on how he expects this to work.
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.
One of the central points behind Tragedy of the Commons 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, 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