Creative Commons In the News

An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC is running an article on a new licensing scheme being used to bring civility to the world of copyright." From the article: "Interest in Creative Commons licenses comes as artists, authors and traditional media companies begin to warm to the idea of the Internet as friend instead of foe, and race to capitalize on technologies such as file-sharing and digital copying." At the same time, mpesce writes "Boing Boing is reporting that the Australian equivalent of the Screen Actors Guild, the MEAA, has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions. 'The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be inappropriate.'"

Comments

Anti-Comeptitive

[PepeGSay]

Does anyone else see the MEAA's decision as anti-competitive?

Re:Anti-Comeptitive

[pavon]

The parent post is identical to a post in the original story linked from Boing Boing.

Same person or copy-paste karma-whore? - You decide.

Re:Anti-Comeptitive

[Anonymous Coward]

And they are not even very good at boosting the asking price. I used to work for a company where I was subject to award rates negotiated by MEAA (even though I was not a member), and they never did a good job of negotiating decent pay. They were more concerned about increasing penalty rates (which didn't affect those like me who were salaried).

Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons

[QuantumG]

The part I dislike the most about the Creative Commons set of licenses is the advocation of non-commercial restrictions, as if they were a good idea. This thoroughly reduces the distribution of the work. Suppose you make an icon set and place it under one of the Creative Commons licenses that has the non-commercial restriction. This means that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and all the other commercial Linux distributions can't put your icon set on their CD. It means that only people who contact you directly can use your icon set. That's hardly freedom.

On a totally different note. I was thinking about the part of the GPL that most people really don't get: the offer to supply source code at a later date. More than any other part of the GPL that section really confuses people. Maybe we should make a GPL-lite, where source code simply MUST accompany all binary distributions. That'd clear up the confusion for programs licensed under it at least.

Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons

[Da_Biz]

I disagree. I've written several prose pieces where I have used Creative Commons to limit how it's used. As the creator and copyright holder of the piece, I believe I have the right to say how it's used.

In my case, I permitted free distribution of the piece, restricted anyone from selling a reprint of it without my permission, and did not want anyone to build upon to work to preserve it's artistic integrity. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong there.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0

Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons

[scragz]

One other thing that I don't like so much is that attribution is now included in every license. Granted, I mostly license my music under a solely attribution license. For other works, however, I might want to have the option of only NoDerivs.

Also on the topic of over-restrictions, I've noticed that lots of people, especially when first getting into CC, pick the biggest combination of restrictions possible. This makes using their works more difficult than it should be and almost seems like they're saying they support CC, but they don't want to give you too much freedom.

Re:Non-commercial elements of the Creative Commons

[schon]

the advocation of non-commercial restrictions, as if they were a good idea.

Maybe it's because people believe that they *are* a good idea?

Suppose you make an icon set and place it under one of the Creative Commons licenses that has the non-commercial restriction. This means that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and all the other commercial Linux distributions can't put your icon set on their CD.

First of all, no it doesn't. What it means is that Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc can't put your icon set on CDs that they *sell*. They're perfectly free to include it in a downloadable ISO, or some other means.

Second of all, if someone's making money of something *I* made, why should it not be me? (Or, why is it such a big deal if they have to contact me first?)

It means that only people who contact you directly can use your icon set.

Yes, well let's see: there's Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse... who else? I can see how difficult it is for *all these people* to contact me - man, how could I ever manage the time to talk to them all? There are clearly tens of people who are selling Linux commercially.

That's hardly freedom.

Bullshit. They're perfectly free to make their own icons.

Over a barrel

[Stumbles]

has forbidden its members to work in Creative Commons productions.

I think the above phrase is being overlooked by most people. I mean that's a pretty strong statement, to paraphrase, "I/We forbid you to do any work that does not make us money."

The question I have, is that part of "the members" contract or is this "a new policy"?

Either way I have to wonder just how far they can go at curtailing a members outside activities.

Re:Over a barrel

[Alsee]

to paraphrase, "I/We forbid you to do any work that does not make us money."

Unless I'm mistaken, they offered MORE THAN DOUBLE payscale. 110% above normal.

They just plain forbid members to do any Creative Commons work. They refuse to accept Creative Commons money and they forbid their members to take any Creative Commons money.

I can't help picturing a black man sitting down in a diner and the white owner telling the waitresses they can't serve him any food, even after he offers to pay double. "We don't like your kind coming 'round here making trouble".

-

Re:One sentence license:

[rtb61]

All my ideas are free to use - CONDITIONAL - You use mine you give me yours.

A better licence for copyright and patents (it's recursive and can spread rapidly - As microsoft would say very viral in nature).

MEAA?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Are they an important part of Australian film making? And if so, isn't this restraint of trade?

Re:not just money

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you'll have to work harder to build a brand from the ground instead of buying your way into Star Wars or The Jungle Book, or I Robot (was any oversight involved there?)

The Jungle Book is in the public domain, even in the USA.

Rudyard Kipling died in 1936. The Jungle Book fell into the public domain fifty years later, in 1986. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, passed in 1998, did not apply retroactively to copyrights which had already expired. This of course only applies to Kipling's novel _The Jungle Book_, written in 1894.

It does not apply to Disney's ghastly derivative work: that movie is slated to fall into the public domain in the USA 95 years after it's copyright date, or in the year 2062, barring changes in copyright law.

See http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1907/ki pling-bio.html for more info on Kipling's life and work.
--
AC

Re:One sentence license:

[SydShamino]

One downside of public domain is that it doesn't nothing to avoid the implication of plagiarism.

What if I write something truly insightful in one of these posts? Then, later, I use the same words in a speech when I'm running for some government office?

If I release the text into the public domain, others can take those words and reuse them without any credit required. I could take Tom Sawyer and republish the novel without listing the author at all; neither he nor his descendents have any rights to the book.

But, if I reuse the words later in another context, I could be accused of plagiarism. It might be difficult to prove that I was the original author of text that had been passed around through the public domain for X years. By retaining copyright on my posts, I can force those that wish to quote them to attribute them to me.

(This did happen. Someone from a public domain advocacy website wanted to use quotes from one of my slashdot posts on his site. But he had released all text on his site into the public domain. I had to decline unless he could change his license, not because I care where my words were used, but because I care that they be attributed to me. /shrug)

Re:One sentence license:

[QuantumG]

Allow me to explain. Say you were to park your tomato peeler in the town square and put up a sign that said "here's my tomato peeler, you are free to use it". If Joe The Farmer trucks his entire crop into town, loads it into your tomato peeler, presses the big GO button and discovers that your tomato peeler is actually defective he has ruined his entire crop. He can now sue you for damages. The exact same thing can happen with software. You put a tax calculation program in the public domain, Joe The Investor uses it to calculate how much tax he needs to pay on his investments, the tax man fines Joe $1,000,000 because he paid the wrong amount of tax, Joe sues you for damages.

It doesn't matter if you put a sign that says "may be defective" on your tomato peeler or on your tax program. The difference between your tomato peeler and your tax program is that, if your tax program is not in the public domain, you can put a license on it which says no-one can sue you for damaged caused by your tax program. Joe must accept the license before he is legally entitled to copy the software onto his computer. That's the power copyright law gives you and is most of the reason why people use a BSD-style license over the public domain.

Re:I suspect

[usurper_ii]

Well, I have a lot of **time** in some practice Cisco CCNA test questions and I released them under a Creative Commons license:

http://www.quest4.org/ccna/

I guess some people might think it is crappy, but in the end, I hope to have a test question pool that equals the questions in software that sells for anywhere between 10.00 and 60.00 (true, you do get some extra features).

Why did I release under a Creative Commons? Because I really wish someone could fill in the holes and come up with a really good test engine for the questions. I don't have time to do that, myself. And as long as they don't charge for the program, I don't care what they do with the questions.

In the end, I think everyone wins with Creative Commons.

Usurper_ii

Re:One sentence license:

[Qzukk]

a formular for making styrofoam cups is an invention.

If you put an encyclopedia entry in the public domain and I fail my history lesson as a result I can sue you for damages. For the crime of being wrong? I can sue you for damages because the color of your tie offended me and caused my widdle heart to go pitter-patter, but I'd lose. And so would you.

Blah, if you put an mp3 in the public domain and it trashes my mp3 player I can sue you for damages. Hofstadter posits in one of his essays (published either in Godel Escher Bach or Metamagical Themas, read them both, they're very good) that it would be possible for me to analyze the construction of your music player and develop a song specifically designed to destroy it. Additionally, if you build a machine that analyzed my song and then built a machine immune to the player-smashing effects of my song, that it would be possible to analyze the construction of THAT player-building machine to create a song that would be improperly analyzed by your music-analyzer, resulting it in producing a machine which was not, in fact, immune to the player-breaking effect of my song, and upon attempting to play it would shatter into a million pieces. And so on.

What was the point of that? Not much. However, the "mp3" is NOT whats covered under the Creative Commons license. The song itself is. If I designed a song whose melodies and frequencies were designed to destroy piezoelectric speakers, THAT would be a clear case of damage caused by my song. If it was the mp3 itself that caused the damage, it would be due to the encoders fault (software) or the decoders fault (again software, even if disguised as hardware). Or even your fault (guess you should have let the download finish before getting too impatient and cutting the torrent off at 50% to see what it sounded like)

Re:One sentence license:

[Qzukk]

We're talking about the public domain with regards to copyright, in which case public domain as public (physical) property doesn't enter into the picture. I'd hate to be sued because some kid slipped in the public park 15 miles from here that I've never been to, but everyone is liable for because its owned by "the people".

But wait, what were we arguing about again? I thougt it was somethign about how if I made a song and a copy of that song blew up your player, that was my fault. Somewhere there was a disconnect. Care to point it out for me? Remember, just because "This Land is Your Land" is in the public domain doesn't mean that every mp3 of the song now existing is made by the now long dead author of the original. If an mp3 of "This Land is Your Land" crashes your ipod, regarless of "nefarious copying" or not, you intend to dig up the author's grave and drag the skeleton to court?

Regardless of "physical" embodiment (hint, even before Teh Intarweb, live performances were copyrighted even if they were never set to any media) the core of the matter does not change. The copyright exists for the tune of the song, the words of the song, and the performance of the song (separately, even! just ask ASCAP and BMI!). If you write the Greatest Novel Ever, copyright it, then someone burns the original, you still own the copyright to the Greatest Novel Ever, even if you have to beg the copyright office to return the copy of it you submitted to them for registration back so you can scribble it on the backs of napkins to get it published. It's not the paper, its the words.