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Creative Commons Responds To ASCAP Letter
An anonymous reader writes "Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid has a followup to the story about ASCAP telling its members that organizations like EFF and Creative Commons are undermining copyright. A spokesperson from Creative Commons said, 'It's very sad that ASCAP is falsely claiming that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright. Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses — plain and simple, without copyright, these tools don't even work.' He also said, 'Many tens of thousands of musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public.' Many ASCAP members are already expressing their disappointment with the ASCAP letter over at Mind the Gap. Sounds like ASCAP will be in damage control for a while."
Although the focus is on arists of media and music, the implications to the software industry are staggering. Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid as a result of ASCAP and similar lobbying. All that work you and I have put into creating a free software ecosystem are for nought, because some some media execs want to get paid for performances by musicians who didn't sign with them.
I donated to Creative Commons, EFF, and FSF for the first time today. You might not care about the media aspects but our industry absolutely depends on copyleft licenses and creative freedom, so I encourage all of you to do the same.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The death throws of an obsolete industry are amusing and sad. The lazy abusers of other people's talents do not like to see their revenue stream cease as those who perform all the hard labor find alternate methods of representation and distribution. Claims that they represent the viewpoints, and wish to protect the interests, of their sheep, fall upon unsympathetic ears. The revolution will not be televised, but it will be on Youtube, under CC.
After they change it to a profit-oriented | public domain dichotomy, they will work to co-opt the public domain. This is easily accomplished by doing compilations, revisions, or other transformation to a public domain work. Then they will attempt to ensure that any version that remains in the public domain becomes unavailable or that its source is sufficiently unpopular/unrecognized. At the same time, they will lobby for laws which will undermine any public domain repositories. They are already lobbying to have facts themselves copyrighted (as opposed to compilations of facts, which are currently copyrightable). The public domain is easy for them to undermine, while free culture licenses are next to impossible to undermine under the laws they have already succeeded in securing.
This strategy could be combated by setting up non-profit public domain repositories which take the same strategy of re-copyrighting works from the public domain, while refusing to license the works to for-profit ventures and making them available to the public freely or if that won't work through a membership mechanism, or some other strategy. This counter-strategy will inevitably fragment and require new strategies, etc, etc.
ASCAP's aim in the original letter was to stop people releasing their own works under copyleft licences. This would effectively ban Wikipedia, the entire text of which is CC-by-sa. Does ASCAP really want that particular fight? (I've already suggested on foundation-l that WMF respond to this issue.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The EFF is slightly more moderate, although they do employ Doctorow, and seem to have a habit of doing what they can to prevent any enforcement of copyright.
Cory Doctorow hasn't been employed by the EFF in the last 5 years. He's been a full-time writer since January 2006.
Can we assume that your other claims are of similar accuracy?