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

Re:Pooh-pooh?

[rco3]

"Poo-poo" is American adolescent idiom meaning excrement, as in "I went poo-poo in my diapers again!"

In this usage, it means she's full of shit.

Re:Rosen's view of copyright..

[shark72]

That's not the context in which she meant it. It was in the context over her and Lessig's disagreement of the copyright term extensions act which pushed the maximum term to life of author + 70 years.

Rosen argues that this way, a copyright can be a legacy. This aligns those people who make money via their creative output (as opposed to, say, tilling a field or screwing plastic things together on an assembly line) to be in a better position to support their family once they've shrugged this mortal coil. She was not arguing that copyright terms should be forever (such a change would, of course, be unconstitutional). Her analogy stopped at leaving a legacy for one's children.

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.