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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
Don't feed the trolls. Andrew Orlowski is not simply failing to understand with an open mind and a desire to learn, he is choosing to not understand in order to incite. Don't let yourself be baited.
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And here I thought it was all about the Pentiums.
Mr. Orlowski's arguments are the same ones as get trotted out time and again against open source. Regardless of whether you think open source is awesome or overrated, it's tough to argue that open source is irrelevant, which is how Mr. Orlowski paints the Creative Commons.
For example, you could easily convert:
into
Similarly:
Is the Creative Commons going to become huge? Perhaps not. But Mr. Orlowski's gotta come up with better arguments than these tired ones.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
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.
What is the whole point of his diatribe? It's not like someone took a gun to the artist's head and told him to do it. The artist presumably read and understood what he is doing and did it. Can we just stop this paternalism? If Ray Charles wants to keep his music royalties and rights, he can. It's not as though CC is being pressed into law. It's your material and your choice. Behind his comment is this assumption that most artists are morons and will want to revoke his decision some day. That's perfectly alright and he can. He can release his work under some other license if he likes. CC is just a convient template to use if that's the road you want to take.
And guess what? It is through the sampling of CC music from iRate radio that I discovered new music and purchased copies of artists' other songs. You can give some of your music away for free and keep the rest under copyright. You can do whatever the hell you want with your work. CC is just one option out there. Having choices is usually good.
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As I remember it, creative commons does not involve giving up copyright, but simply telling others you are exempting certain activities from litigation, such as noncommercial sharing, remixing, etc. http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
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According to sources on the CC mailing list, Creative Commons licenses can be changed (for future downloaders) but not revoked (for people who downloaded your CC licensed work in the past).
You retain ownership of the copyright and as such you can choose to change the license at any time.
You can't however revoke a license you have already granted. That means if you relase something under the Attribution-Sharealike license, and someone downloads it that same day, then they are free to use it under terms of that license for ever. If you change the license to 'All Rights Reserved' the very next day, then future downloaders can't use it at all.
To complicate things though, someone *could* just download it from the original downloader who is forced to always make it available under terms of his or her BY-SA license (brain explodes).
The challenge is going to be proving what license you downloaded something under. One way to potential prove what CC terms you D/L'd something under is the Internet Archive, another is Yahoo Myweb (although IAMNAL etc).
IMHO I think the CC organisation has done a poor job of explaining things like this and other similarly complex issues. They don't have a message board on their website, and emailed questions are never answered.
Creative Commons certainly aren't helping diffuse the misinformation out there which is a shame, and makes attacks like this one hardly suprising.
but i didn't see anyone buying 'good' music. what was that point about comnpusa again? oops, never mind.
sum.zero
US Copyright law is basically just a bunch of restrictive default rules about what people can & can't do with somebody else's work. The author can change these rules, typically by granting a license for other uses. But, if the author fails to do this, then the default rules still apply.
Writing license agreements, though, is generally the purview of lawyers. Because lawyers are expensive and time-consuming, many creators do not go through the trouble, even if they do not want to retain all the default rights. As a result, earing serious liability for infringement, few people subsequently use these works.
With Creative Commons, there is no need to see a lawyer if they don't want to use the default rules -- they have a set of standard agreements already pre-packaged for the layperson to use. As a result, there's virtually no cost to letting people reuse your work.
There's another benefit -- because the agreements are standard, users only need to understand them once. There's no need to see a lawyer to explain each license agreement that comes in through the door.
I think this guy is hardly one to be considered an "authority" on either copyright, the internet, or creative commons for that matter.
I trust Lessig, a law professor, in his administration of creative commons, and consider his support for the viability of it's license a lot more valuable than that of a journalist who seems to believe "audible magic" would actually work in "on the ground" p2p filtering situations.
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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"
No problemo, there is a "no commercial use" type of Creative Commons licence available.
To quote them:"Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions."
And specifically, you can choose as part of your licencing conditions: "Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work and derivative works based upon it but for noncommercial purposes only.
Examples: Gus publishes his photograph with a Noncommercial license. Camille incorporates a piece of Gus's image into a collage poster. Camille is not allowed to sell her collage poster without Gus's permission."
Linky
CC licencing was created (I think) to bridge the gap between the full copyright laws and the public domain. It enables people who want to have a bit of fun with something (music, writing, graphics etc)to be able to release it into the wild with some re-use provisos attached.When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
We recently created a website for collaboration in creative writing - Collaze that uses cc licence. We wanted the contributors to write freely for the public domain without losing the rights to commercially utilize their work later. CC seemed to be custom made for this purpose. So, tomorrow if some entity wants to commercialize the collaborative work, it can do so provided it has the permission of the contributors. Writers can agree and give thier permission to the publisher with or without taking royalty - this depends totally on the writer. I think this is just the beginning. CC will be great for a variety of collaborative work in the future.
Explore your creative side
In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it, I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you unless you try to profit from it.")
But how do you define "profit"? If nobody would benefit in any way from the use of your work, then why would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and profit are synonymous here. Maybe they don't sell your song. But maybe they post it on a Web site that accepts advertising. Are they profiting from your song then? It seems to me that if you want to set up all these profit/don't profit clauses, you need to write a little bit more fine print than your average Creative Commons license gives you.
Second, copyright law already gives the author of a work absolute and complete control of how it is used. I'll give you an example of how this works. I am the author and copyright holder of a comic strip called The Adventures of Action Item. Since I first drew it in 1999, this comic strip has had a fairly storied existence. It's been e-mailed around the known universe, printed up in magazines, used as a print sample, and it's constantly available on the Web page above. Every now and again someone writes me to ask if they can use it in one way or another, and my response varies.
The point of all this? Every case is different. But that's just the thing -- existing copyright law gives me that right. I can really do whatever I want with my own works, and I can grant that other people can use them for whatever
Breakfast served all day!
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"
www.groklaw.net (Groklaw)
:P
It is a VERY major work, and it's under the Creative Commons liscense.
en.wikipedia.org (Wikipedia)
It is also a VERY major work, and is also under the Creative Commons liscense.
So.. um, you're not only a bad bad AC, but you're also a wrong, wrong AC
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 :)
Well I agree it does look like that on the face of it. Certainly the arguments resemble the ones used against the GPL. Comoditise the product and it's value is undermined universally. That might have some small validity with software, but not creative or information content, eg. journalism.
There are great writers, there are even great journalists. Their writing and insights will be sort out because of the quality of the writing or the deeper understanding gained by reading it. Because of this their work will always have an intrinsic value.
Then, of course, there are the hacks. People with no special talent or deep knowledge. In fact a fairly ordinary person with some experience and maybe some training. Given that and the right information there are plenty of people that could do just as well. OK, so most CC isn't going to be even that good, but some of it undoutedly will be. There are plenty of hacks that may be given quite a run for their money by CC material.
So as I see it there is FUD, yes. Not just the stuff people like Andrew Orlowski are trying to spread, but their own. Their doubt in their own ability, their uncertainty over a continuing market, and ultimately their fear.
Apparently, Toone is one of the handful of people willing to provide Orlowski with deliciously inflammatory quotes at a moment's notice. From this article:Sure, Wikipedia has been an unmitigated economic disaster, chewing up hundreds of millions in startup capital while providing no benefit to anybody... no, wait. That was pets.com.
When Toone says, "[geeks think] that the geek experience somehow supplants all previous culture and creative expression," it's clear that he is either making stuff up to get under peoples' skins, or is basing his impressions on the extreme fringe. Either way, he and Orlowski both seem to feel personally threatened by the idea of open culture. My theory is that they've both got too much invested in the idea that "quality is paid for". For Orlowski, the fact that he gets paid to write his drivel is the very thing that raises it above the drivel unpaid masses to the level of "Good Culture". So if a significant number of people prefer the work of "amateurs", then what is it that gives him a right to a paycheck?
Okay, nothing good comes from armchair psychoanalysis. But if you saw the hatchet job he did on Lessig, well, the bastard deserves far worse.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Better communications have all but removed some hideous inequities. It's no longer the case, for example, that Northern Soul artists were dying in poverty ignorant of the fact that thousands of people were celebrating their music on the other side of the Atlantic at all night parties.
Well, nowadays orthern Soul artists were dying in poverty absolutely aware of the fact that thousands of people are celebrating their music on the other side of the Atlantic at all night parties. Communication transfers information. Not legal rights associated with it. And money follow the legaleese transfer channels, not data transfer channels.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
...he does like complex solutions and is suspicious of simple, elegant solutions. He also likes getting more readers for El Reg. He is a business guy, ultimately, and his biz is bringing eyeballs to El Reg.
Andrew and I both live in SF. I met him for lunch one day at a pasta restaurant on Kearny between Bush and Pine. We talked about a film I'm producing, the Digital Tipping Point, which is a film about the free open source software's part in the cultural benefits of bringing more minds on line. My point was that bringing more minds on line means, more noise, but more quality creativity, too.
In that discussion, he panned both Lessig and Clayton Christensen, both of whom are influential in the upcoming DTP film. He doesn't like what he views as "economic determinism." He thought that the cc relies too heavily on the belief that more access to technology will create more art works of genuine value. And he thought that Harvard Biz Prof Clayton Christensen's work was too simplistic and a form of economic determinism. He actually became quite peeved at Christensen's line of thinking during our discussion. He kept insisting that both Christensen and Lessig are pushing simplistic ideas, and I kept thinking to myself that he had not spent enough time trying to understand Christensen and Lessig, and was dismissing them merely because they both are popular now.
I also kept thinking to myself that Andrew values complex ideas, and I think that he believes that as a journalist, he needs to very visibly display his independence of thought for fear of being labeled a party-line thinker.
Ultimately, it is there that Andrew makes his greatest mistake, IMHO. He's so eager to display his independence of thought that he sometimes will have a knee-jerk reaction against popular ideas, such as the cc or Christensen's theory of disruptive technologies.
So no, Andrew was not trolling with his two stories on the cc. That was the real Andrew O, IMHO. I like Andrew's writing a great deal. I think that he's often right on target, and quite funny. I also think that he is overly concerned about appearing to be an independent thinker.
So Andrew, please relax. You often write great stuff, but this rant about the cc is not one of your best pieces. Please let it drop and move on to something else.
Christian Einfeldt
You may believe it, but I don't think many people do. Sometimes the results of science may be elegant such that a scientist may appreciate it on a aesthetic level.
Discovering something elegant doesn't seem to me the same process as creating something. The scientist isn't expressing something in the same way and science is bound by trying to model the universe, you can't change the equation to express something different.
So for me science completely fails to be art, however much I may admire the results.
Art can be created using science, or the results of science (technology) but plenty of art can be about expressing emotions. I studied theory of music, but many of my favourite songs are three cords and voice laden with emotion. I'll take the lyrical over the mathematical in music every time.
I write code, I can appricate the craft of a well written algorithm, but that doesn't make it art (to me, since art is such a subjective term).