Slashdot Mirror
Andrew Orlowski Answers Mail on Creative Commons
chronicon writes "Andrew Orlowski takes another swipe at Creative Commons licensing with a look through the mailbag of responses he received from a previous diatribe on the subject. It's obvious to Mr. Orlowski that creativity is 'all about the benjamins.' Yet one interesting point he throws out has me pondering, is a Creative Commons License permanently irrevocable once it's put out there?"
Does CC improve the enforceability? I mean, what's the incentive to claim/release/share a copyrighted article if there is no way of protecting it properly?
If a work is released under a CC license, will it be brought to court and judged accordingly in a quick manner?
What's the difference between CC and common laws in terms of enforceability. It seems nowadays, lawsuits are about financial depth, whoever has enough cash to burn in court for the next 10-20 years will be pretty safe from any litigation, regardless of the right or wrong.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Yet one interesting point he throws out has me pondering, is a Creative Commons License permanently irrevocable once it's put out there?
In answer, this is from the CC Attribution-NonCommercial license (bold and italics added for emphasis):
So clearly it *is* permanantly irrevocable, which is a good thing. If it weren't, how could the end user be assured that her or his freedoms to use the software (or whatever) under the license would still be there in the future? This way, an author can't just say "this isn't working out for me, now you have to pay me $10 to keep using [whatever]," as that would be tantamount to extortion.
Additionally, from the linked Register article:
This is why there is a Non-Commercial version of the license. And this is also why having a work distributed under a CC license doesn't prevent you from ALSO licensing it under other licenses! That's the whole idea of the NC versions of the license: if someone wants to use your work commercially, they can contact you to work out another arrangement so that you would get some form of compensation for the profits that they might make off of your work.
But seriously, if you don't like the license, make your own! Nobody's forcing people to use these licenses and I don't see why this person seems to think that they're creating a "crisis" of sorts. Creative Commons licenses are just an easy way of having your work distributed the way you want, and with a license written by a lawyer so that there are no possible loopholes for which someone could take advantage.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
his nick is the pitbull isn't it? so those would be dog canines, not vampire teeth.
sum.zero
I can understand trolling up some important geeky political issue, but using Lessig's abuse testimony in a personal attack against him is just sick.
Second, there is a non-commercial version of the CCL. This lets the author/artist sue anyone making money from his/her work, while still releasing it under the CCL.
According to the Andrew Orlowski, those that are lobbying hardest for CC licenses are neurotic Aspies, pleading for their pet project but uninterested in helping creators.
/.
:)
Ad hominem, impuning motives and infantilization of those you don't agree with. That's no way to argue.
Except maybe on
Oh... never mind then. Way to go editors, we need more troll posts!
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
But a big concern is that many artists don't actually KNOW what they're signing up for. I've talked to a lot of artists lately who thought that CC-C-SA was the best thing since three-buttoned mice, but also had this crazy notion that it somehow required Sony to pay you royalties if they pressed 10 million copies of your CD and sold it all over the world. But you don't have any protection there, so you're screwed.
The real issue is that CC stops short of addressing compensation in all this. We're all quite good at giving proper credit to those involved, but CC and GPL don't address the basic social contract concept of paying for what you use. If you could say: "Use freely", "Use only with per-case permission", or "Use with this standard royalty formula", the licenses would actually be fully useful, and the creator would have a full deck to play with.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Two comments jumped out at me in Orlowski's article. The first seems unable to distinguish the exercise of speech from the act of listening:
Another article, responding to Orlowski's absurd claim that geeks believe the technology, not the artist, is responsible for creativity, claims that geeks believe:
Implicit in this rejection is an incredibly elitist conception of creativity as an inborn talent. It's a short step from here to saying it's a waste of time to teach writing (or painting or what have you) because the great writers are born and will write regardless.
For some geniuses that is surely true. For others, the lack isn't tools but practice: creativity, like most skills, can be improved through use. Easy access to technology helps. Easy access to culture which can be built upon, which building is essential to all art from Shakespeare to Warhol, helps even more. It is this latter lack that Creative Commons targets, and which the $20 for "speech" (i.e. passive listening) doesn't address. But these folks are too blinded by the silly "blue LEDs" to see past the technology.
I feel from the article that it appears many people do not see the computer as an artistic tool. The same way a painter sees a brush. A writer a manuscript. A musician an instrument.
They see it more as a TV, a stereo, a delivery system. They see the computer as the end point of creative media, not the beginning. "So DRM must be enforced in the end point."
But to many of us techno-utopians who have grown up around computers and could see the machine without limitations, DRM presents a threat to our creativity. It limits what we consider a limitless machine.
Would a painter feel threatened if some colour paints would not work with his/her paint brush?
Would a musician feel threatened if certain rhythms and melodies could not be played?
I see my computer not as a burden for working life, but a portfolio and canvas of all my creativity.
The article seems to think they know 'us techno-utopians' but I feel that I have been misrepresented.
--
"self confessed techno-utopian computer artist"
I think that you have hit it dead on and that is where the Dvorak/Orlowski confusion seems to be so contrived. CC is not about granting the copyright holder more rights--no one can do that but congress. It's not anti-copyright either. Not at all. It's just a simple way for you to tell consumers en masse what they can and cannot do with your work. If you'd rather do the one-off permissions thing, then don't use CC. Easy.
If you post a By Attribution - Non-Commercial CC license with your work and someone wishes to use it commercially, then they can ask you and you can say yes or no. You, as the copyright holder, are still in control.
If you want to STOP licensing a particular work under a CC license, you can do that too--for all future consumers. Anyone who obtained the work previously under the CC license that you now no longer wish to use STILL has the rights you granted to them (until the term of the copyright expires, which will matter to neither party since they will both now have long been dead. What is the term now? Life of the author + 70 years or something to that effect?).
Either way you slice it, your rights as copyright holder are not diminished at all. You are in control to grant redistribution rights to others either en masse via CC or individually as interested parties approach you. Whatever works best for you...
So *what* is the big deal with these guys that they so despise CC and act like it is something that it is not? I want to think it is more then trolling for hits, but there doesn't seem to be any other motive that I can tell...
So *what* is the big deal with these guys that they so despise CC and act like it is something that it is not? I want to think it is more then trolling for hits, but there doesn't seem to be any other motive that I can tell...
The point is that those whose livelihoods depend upon acting as go-betweens between the creators of "IP", and the consumers of "IP", feel threatened by the possibilities of the internet in general, and the FOSS movement in particular.
For two thousand years, creative people wrote books. THey wrote these books because they wanted to write them, and because they wanted people to read them.
How much money do you think Livy made for writing "Discourses"? How much money did Julius Ceasar make from writing "The Gallic War", and "The Cival War"? How much did Machiavelli make from having written "The Prince"?
In all three cases, the answer is not very much. They didn't write those books to make money from renting out puplication rights... they each had other motives that did not involve money.
So now we fast-forward to 2005, where there is an ingrained cultural meme that ALL human interaction MUST be motivated by the exchange of folding money... except there are many creative people who have the same motives that the authors and creators of past centuries had. Thier motives for writing a book, or a play, or a computer program may not involve money.
This, of course, is very worrisome to those whose entire existence is predicated upon their ability to stick themselves inbetween creators and viewers, and to leech a living from that position.
The leeches see that their two-century-long free lunch on the blood of creative people may soon be coming to an end.
So they wiggle and whine about any liscense that cuts them out of the transaction. Oh, boo hoo hoo, the GPL will end the world, or boo hoo hoo, the CC liscense will end all existence. Heh, and for the leech-like middlemen, they're correct :)
"Engineering recipes, or source code, aren't the same as works of art."
I believe science IS art. Art IS science, and anyone who cannot see the connection most likely isnt neither a scientist or artist. Einstien's formula was art, his methods were scientific. Source code is art, the methods, formulas, and algorithms are the science.
When I listen to music I listen with the exact same critical ear and attention to detail that I give to sourcecode I'm reading.
Second, music is not a business, hacking is not a business, its an art first and a business second because all the elite programmers, hackers and composers were both artists and scientists. Bach was to music what Carmack is to programming and as Einstein was to physics. They used science to create works of art.
We need to promote sci-art. Mixing science and art.