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Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "The founding editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: get a Creative Commons license and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it-yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.'"
AFAIK what he's suggesting is already within the scope of the CC license.
It's been floated before, under the name CCPlus. See also Slashdot's coverage of CCPlus.
He isn't trying to stop car-boot pirates, the only place he mentions pirates is a throwaway line at the end "cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners". He's talking about people who want to use your material but not to just rip you off. Maybe "would turn the people who yesterday had no choice other than to be pirates into tomorrow's partners" would have been clearer, but less snappy.
Actually, from what I've read, Corey doesn't claim that it will solve the piracy problem. He tries to tackle the problem of individuals creating derivative works without hiring lawyers to negotiate a license. For example if some person remixes a song, they either have to negotiate a deal with the record company and pay them royalties (and this involves hiring a lawyer to negotiate), or do it without hiring a lawyer, and thus be called a pirate. The latter is what Corey tries to address.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Dr No is probably a bad example. They had no idea whether it was going to be a success. Contemporary films To Kill a Mockingbird and Lawrence of Arabia had 2 times and 15 times the budget respectively.