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.'"

Comments

Paying pirates

[BSAtHome]

So, you want pirates to pay royalties. I always thought that pirates we pirates because they did not want to pay the royalties. What another license makes for a difference is beyond me. If they do not want to pay, they simply will remain pirates.

Re:Paying pirates

[eugene2k]

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.

Re:Paying pirates

[jedidiah]

Actually, all he's advocating is the old state of things. The casual swappers
shouldn't be prosecuted, persecuted and litigated. The side effects of trying
to squash all the little ants ends up creating more collateral damage than it's
worth. It's far better to apply the old intent of the laws and the original
pirate ethos.

There was always a distinction made between those that just passed stuff
around and those that tried to profit from it financially.

The big problem of course, as others have said, is the fact that it is
big media that has driven the recent changes in the other direction.
They're the ones that want to make copyright perpetual and turn
criminalize everyone. They will never go for this.

Re:BRILLIANT IDEA

[mftb]

CC is all about free sharing. Personally, I have no objection to people using my music in free projects. I do, however, have an objection to people using it to make money without cutting me in.

Re:I like Cory but that isn't going to work

[PhilHibbs]

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.

Re:BRILLIANT IDEA

[twisteddk]

I have to agree. Current copyright laws dont work, because they do not allow "fair use". In fact licensing and patenting is getting to a point where the social benefits are not weighed in and thus otherwise profitable and usefull tools are distributed illegally.

However, the proposal will work fine for components, patents and such. But would be disasterous for coplete products, and would require a fair-use or even free-use model to follow it.

As someone else already pointed out, there are a ton of piriates out there who pirate to make money, and another ton who just "make a copy for the car", or even those who "make a copy for their friends". In either case the complete replication of a work is so simple that the recipient has no intrest in purchasing the original work, because the copy is "perfect", in that it's digital.
Some countries are already starting to deal with this issue by giving out licenses for "unlimited use" of example music, while you pay a monthly fee, this fee makes you able to download pretty much any piece of music and use for any non-commercial use you want. Same thing goes for videos and books. For years you have been able to get them at the local library as often as you wanted, basically for free.

With these great distribution models, then where's the incentive to pirate ? In the exact business model that the distribution companies are employing. Libraries and ISPs have limits in their spending policies because of wear and tear on their products, aswell as the strain on their profits due to aquisitions. But once the product becomes digital, it's just a matter of time before a purchase will last lifetimes, given that they again are subject to a decent pricing.

You dont have to be a genious to know that the laws of supply and demand show that the higher the price, the lower the demand and vice versa. So in our day and age, you can actually distribute your products at a price close to free, if the user himself will create the physical object (CD, book, whatever) on his home printer. So with the significantly lower price on distribution, a lower prices can be charge for the product, and more people will "buy".
The business model suggested simply states that IF the user decides to make a little dough by turning the download into for instance a karaoke thing and selling it to his friends, then he should fork over a part of his profits. I can't think of ANY artist who would normally provide his work free of charge who would object to this business model.

Ofcourse that doesn't stop people from pirating against THIS model, or even the business from claiming they wont make money this way, but how's that different from today ?
It's different in one major aspect: People who contribute, and people who are not profiting from other peoples work are no longer criminalized. A 6-year old who just wants to hear the latest justin timberlake song, or the co-worker who hands his collegaue a DVD and says: "hey I recorded this from the late night show, you REALLY have to see it" will no longer get treated like the taiwaneese pirate who bootlegs 60 million DVDs a month and sells them on ebay. So IF the taiwaneese pirate is willing to fork over $5 pr DVD he sells, then presumably the licensee dont give a crap if it's buena vista home entertainment or hai-fats local DVD store that made the physical copy as long as they get their end of the business.

Even though the idea is not new, it is IMO a great way to legalize (and in a smaller way also to profit from) the "casual pirate", while offering the organized crime a way to become respectable, and at the same time holding the door open for the possibility of legal action.