Slashdot Mirror
Pearl Jam Releases Video Under Creative Commons
minitrue writes "Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone to "legally copy, distribute and share the clip" for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through May 24, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity."
These are guys who've been in the arena trying to fight unfairness with Ticketmaster and the bigger Music Houses. While they might not be everyones flavour musically, they are definately on of the bands trying to break molds with how their music is distributed. Maybe this is a little bittersweet, but damn good to see someone trying to get paid without ripping half the world off.
Actually, I just remembered, this could have been so much better if they opened up the licensing to allow remixing and editing, didn't NIN do that and give out Garage Band files of the work too? Maybe they'll open it up by hosting it past the 24th, even torrent it, that'd at least add some credibility and promote the "share" aspect they seem to be pushing, at least one would hope.
Did you LISTEN to that monstrosity, or just watch it with the volume muted? Surely Eddie V could have invested in an auto-tune plugin for his sequencer, at least...
More like... nerdular nerdence!
In essence, video clips are just advertising, and based on that, this move would not qualify too much on the revolutionary side of things. But, if you think about it as a political statement, it's a very good thing to do in dark times like these. Think about how many folks are going to see such a license for the first time on their lifes. Think about all the fan-kids out there with garage bands that will start seeing open licenses as something cool. Think about how many media droids are going to need to educate themselves on the "open" movement to be able to write a comment on that. Of course, none of this could happen, but how can we know?
Your ad could be here!
Because most of their revenue probably derives from concert sales. Allowing the sharing of their videos only serves to get more young people introduced to Pearl Jam. The more 14 year olds discover Pearl Jam, the more 14 year olds might go out and discover their old albums like Ten and Vs, and also come to see them live.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
shouldn't the quotes be around "advertized"?
I don't get why people complain about IP and anti-piracy laws, but when artists actually start embracing the whole music-sharing rhetoric people get upset that it gets reported and accuse the artists of pulling a publicity stunt.
I mean, are we trying to convince artists that we don't want them to let people download/share music for free? What is the problem here? What does it take for people to stop complaining about the music industry?
What is that supposed to mean?
They produced a music video, as musicians sometimes do.
They released it under a Creative Commons license, which is rare.
This allows people to do rare things with a mainstream artist's creative content, like download it/enjoy it/distribute it for free.
Most artists would have prohibited the above mentioned activities in their license.
Thus, what Pearl Jam has done is interesting news for most of us, and it would benefit fans if other artists followed Pearl Jam's lead.
So what is there for you to possibly complain about? That they haven't sold many CDs at your store? What does that have to do with anything?
Do you have a coherent point to make, or did you just want to post incoherent ramblings?
I know some people don't like RMS, but he nailed this one for sure. Just look at the Slashdot headline for this article "Pearl Jam Releases Video Under Creative Commons"... lumping them all together just as RMS suggested people would. "Creative Commons" without describing the varient doesn't mean anything at all, yet that is the message the headline gives and a real problem with the suite of CC licenses. Certainly, people can specifiy which CC license you are talking about (as the body text of the slashdot article does), but it's still overly confusing.
Consider the analogous slashdot heading "Company Releases Program Under GPL" -- the GPL is a title that unlike CC has a specific meaning, if it's GPL you know what to expect whether you like that license or not. The problem with CC is really worse than the similarily vaguely defined label "open source" because some of the CC licenses are really quite restrictive.
I do understand what the people behind CC are trying to do, and I respect that. I just wish that they had put more effort into promoting the use of individual specific licenses instead of the CC 'brand'. GNU does this well, they have GPL, GFDL, LGPL as their own separate brand instead of just calling it a "GNU license" which doesn't convey the specificness those different concepts represent.
501 Not Implemented
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
People don't buy videos. They buy albums and singles. And don't get all pedantic on me about how some people do buy videos, its a teeny-tiny minority of sales, and would not be financially viable if the videos were not already made for some other reason, like say, advertising.
just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore.
The simplest thing with the most utility that someone might do is rip the audio out of the video and make it into an mp3. But that would be a derivative work and is thus prohibited.
So yeah, this is a rather useless bit of fluff advertising, nothing more.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Correct, you can download Audioslave's video. And if you send it to your grandmother, no one will know. However: you say "videos are available to view for free a million places on the web." Most of these sites (from Youtube to ebaum) would be in violation of copyright to host that video, and will comply with a cease-and-desist rather than face legal action. "Guerilla hosting" is not reliable, as witnessed by the fact that, for every music video you can find surreptitiously hosted, there are fifty you can't.
The other aspect of GPL you've glossed over is "commercial use and derivatives." You can't wish copyright law out of existence; without this protection, General Dynamics gets to use Pearl Jam to sell nuclear warheads, maybe copyrighting its own rework of the lyrics en route. That would be disgusting.
From the horse's mouth: That is somewhat of a misunderstanding--we cannot "ban DRM". What we can do is prevent GPL-covered software from being corrupted into an instrument for implementing DRM. --Richard Stallman
As soon as you say any form of copyright is a good idea, your technical argument ("viewing creates a copy! bits and bytes!") becomes justification for the DMCA. Fair use and common sense become casualties of digital media.
Don't be a dweeb. Free Software are still the good guys.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
You raise some interesting points. As background, what sort of artistic works have you produced, and how have you licensed them? Have you ever undertook something as big and costly as a music video, and then released it with less restrictive terms? In particular, has it been something related to your livelihood?
It's easy for us, as consumers, to state that creators should give away their stuff for free and unrestricted; and when they don't, it's also easy for us to rationalize ignoring others' copyrights. Kudos to you if you've created major works of art and given them away restriction-free -- and if you have, you know it's a pretty big and scary step.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.