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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?"
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.
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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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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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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.
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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
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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"
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 :)