Hilary Rosen Loves Creative Commons

13.7Billion Years writes "Former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen has written a piece in Wired extolling the virtues of Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons licensing, providing such juicy tidbits as 'I'm still cynical about its origins, but I've come to love Creative Commons,' and 'the industry ought to embrace Creative Commons as an agile partner providing tools for new ways to do business.' She's not quite ready to pooh-pooh the current all-or-nothing licensing regime just yet but this sounds like good progress."

Comments

Convenient

[Hatta]

Shame she's not in a position of power anymore. Funny how this happens after she leaves.

Hilary Rosen

[Infonaut]

In this article Rosen revealed a bit of herself. She's not the one-dimensional creature that a lot of RIAA-haters have made her out to be. Her position at the RIAA was never easy:

The presumption in these attacks was that Rosen was calling the plays for the music business and not the other way around. She seems to prefer it that way; she gets paid $1 million a year to shelter the executives from criticism. But in fact, according to those closest to her, she's not the hard-liner in the crusade against file-sharing. Yes, she's the frontwoman. But there are five CEOs backing her up - and some of them make her look like Mary Poppins. "They still think they should put teenagers in jail," says technology guru Esther Dyson. In fact, Rosen tried to steer the labels toward the online future long before they saw it coming. In the mid-'90s, Rosen brought Dyson to a conference of music executives to brief them on how technology would transform their business. Dyson described for them the inevitability of digital delivery, an eventuality Rosen says she had begun to understand but wanted her bosses to hear from an outsider. But as Dyson spoke, the label executives became defensive, then furious. By all accounts, the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

Sure, as the head honcho at the RIAA she was on the wrong side of a lot of issues, but she's not exactly Pol Pot either.

Re:Rosen's view of copyright..

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Such a philosophy doesn't sit well with a portion of the Slashdot crowd who think that society would be better off if artists and writers knew their place -- give away your stuff for free, and hope that you make money by playing live concerts or live book readings. If somebody violates your copyright, don't fight back too hard -- you should be lucky to get what you get. And a big hearty fuck-you if you're uppity enough to put copy protection or DRM on your work -- what's done with your work should be the choice of the Slashdotter, not you. If you have the same aspirations of being a millionaire that, say, a (insert typical Slashdotter profession here) has, check yourself -- you're an artist, and if wandering the countryside in search of scraps was good enough for artists of the 13th century, it's good enough for you. In short -- know your place. A farmer gets to leave a legacy for his children. You don't.

[wearily] The people who say this kind of thing are hardly ever artists or writers themselves. Very often they're parasites (like Rosen and Valenti) who want to get rich off artists' work, however.

I am a writer, among other things; I make a not-insignificant amount of money off writing, and you can be damn sure I want every penny my books earn. However -- I do not believe that my work is perpetually my property, or that of my heirs; perhaps more to the point, I do not believe that it is perpetually the property of my publisher, or any corporation, and most especially not of scumsuckers like the RIAA, the MPAA, or Disney (this last being mentioned because it's largely due to the Mouse's efforts that we have the absurdly extended copyright laws we do.) The government makes, or is supposed to make, a deal with the creators of original work: you put your work out there for people to enjoy (and hopefully buy) and in return, we will protect your right to profit from that work for a limited time. Period. If you don't like it, lobby to amend the Constitution.

My equivalent of a farmer's field is not my book. That would be my computer, which is unlikely to be of any use to my children by the time I die ... My books are the equivalent of a farmer's crop. No rational person would argue that farmers should be paid in perpetuity for crops they harvest once.