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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."
Nice to know that they work with the best interests of their clients in mind!
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.
Dear ASCAP,
Please don't spread lies. The people behind EFF, CC, PK et alia, are smarter than you, and easily ruffled by people getting the facts wrong.
You're in for a schooling.
http
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
I just can't help but laugh at the complete lack of understanding of what Copyleft really is. Here's my stuff, you may quote it, keep a copy for yourself, pass copies along to your friends, but include attribution to the source. What the heck is so damned difficult to understand?
With ACTA looming and governments already planning how to implement it, it seems that unless something else completely disruptive occurs there will be a battle over two competing rights models: individual rights versus copyrights (and other intellectual property rights). I respect intellectual property - to an extent. I believe in copyrights that help spur creativity in arts and sciences, but the original plan for copyrights as endorsed by the US Constitution was for them to grant limited time monopolies to creators. That model has been rejected because of the special interest corruption from multi-national corporations, and now the media cartels are working to make the federal government their handmaiden and servant on the Internet. If you haven't read it yet, the current draft of ACTA calls for action against copyright offenders at the inchoate stage, before the infringement has even been committed. It calls for the creation of an "impending infringer" task-force with a broad mandate to prevent copyright infringement that hasn't even taken place yet. Media reports are claiming that under ACTA it may become illegal to search for the keywords "Metallica album download," even if no infringing material is downloaded. If true, it would destroy the Internet as we know it, and we also know that once government gets its "nose under the tent" that will be just the beginning of its regulatory and enforcement regime. So, as I said before, while I have limited respect for intellectual property and believe it is morally wrong to enjoy another's work by copying it without approval, I believe in individual rights over copyrights. And moreover, I believe in maintaining a relatively free Internet with a certain level of copyright infringement going on if the alternative is clamping down on freedom online in a draconian way to discourage infringement. As the New Deal, the War on Poverty/Great Society, War on Drugs (and some may also argue the War on Terror) have shown us, the government cure to what ails society is usually far worse than the disease.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
While the spokesperson for creative commons may or may not be right, I would like to know that tens of thousands is an accurate number and where he got it from. I hope he is right but I am skeptical that this is a real figure. I know all the artists he mentioned have used creative commons ("including acts like Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Snoop Dogg"). In fact Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band and I was excited when Trent Reznor made that decision for Nine Inch Nails and it's being followed through with his new band How To Destroy Angels (lead by his wife Mariqueen Maandig). I felt these were strong acts in supporting Creative Commons which has served me and many others very well in our business and personal lives. None the less, can someone please point me to a site, registry, document or anything that says tens of thousands of musicians in a reputable manner as the spokesperson has claimed?
For whatever reason the governments of the world got into misguided attempts to 'promote' wealth creation by actually limiting human ability to do so by copying, these misguided attempts include copyrights and patents (though trademarks are really not such a big problem).
Having a good working economy relies on production, not on consumption, and when society starts artificially limiting human ability to produce by copying or in any other way, that society starts losing the edge on its productive capacity and eventually loses its main wealth generator - production (unless of-course, that society does not rely on production but on something else - raw material extraction or wars and stealing things others produce).
Copyright and patent laws kill economy, that's all there is to it.
You can't handle the truth.
When will people take a few minutes to get some reading comprehension and realize that's ASCAP's point. CC is, in ASCAP's point of view, corrupting copyright. You can't say something's being corrupted if it's not being used. ASCAP doesn't want people using copyright in such a fashion as to be giving stuff away. Copyright must be exercised to make a profit, contributing freely to society is to be abhorred and derided as unnatural.
This is why ASCAP is so dangerous. They want to make it so that any and every project must be either profit-oriented, or public domain, with no middle ground. And if you can't afford to monetize something, then you're stuck either keeping it under wraps, or losing complete control of it.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
After this pr disaster I think they should change name to distance themselves. Maybe ASHAT?
ASCAP is (almost) correct. While copyleft doesn't undermine copyright, it does undermine the copyright cartel. If artists begin to license worthwhile, popular, and (monetarily) successful works under copyleft -- if artists succeed while granting people more rights than they, strictly, have to -- then consumers might begin to wonder why more artists -- and big companies -- don't do that. Using copyleft could become a competitive advantage. And then how will Big Music justify restricting users?
If the sheep wake up, the whole industry -- as currently organized -- falls apart. And that's what ASCAP is worried about.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The copyright advocates are undermining copyright by turning a decent idea (limited copyright) into a ridiculous one (holding culture hostage for as long as possible to prop up failing business models). The more they push their agenda the more people will call shenanigans on them and embrace copyleft (if not "piracy").
Boycott ASCAP members. Email your favorite ASCAP artist and let them know why.
1 copyLEFT needs copyRIGHT to actually "work" (you go on the hook for copyright violations if you break a copyleft license)
2 This "Brilliant" act by ASCAP gives the Copyleft folks something they can always use
A COMMON ENEMY
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
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.
How about this instead:
Hey, ASCAP, why do you think you should have the right to do what you want with your stuff but we shouldn't have the right to do what we want with ours? If you don't like Creative Commons licenses, don't use them. Don't tell us what licenses to use for our works. They're our works, not yours. That's what copyright means.
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
As soon as the RIAA and ASCAP hire people with a high enough intelligence to understand what they're reading.
In other words, about the same time hell freezes over.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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?
Do realize that 2,000 sq ft is less even a 45 x 45 feet? The company I work for has a warehouse that big, which is about half our total size. We're a pretty small business, with usually about a dozen employees (or less). And 6 speaker? That's not hard to reach... Some PCs have more than that these days.
I'm not sure if it's your understanding of the word "only" or the measure of "2,000 sq ft" that is faulty here.
It has nothing to do with copyright principles or any clever agenda.
Copyleft cuts ASCAP style enforcers out of the money loop. Plain and simple, it hits them where it hurts: the business model. The letter is just FUD to scare up lobby money - though anything they could accomplish that would effectively halt copyleft licensing would be damaging to the US IT industry.
Why is Creative Commons not working to undermine copyright? Copyrights lasting 9-14 years are clearly justified, but the current system deserves to be undermined.
>>>Penn basically made the argument that recycling is unnercessary because it requires material separation by each person throwing stuff away
Partly but his MAIN argument was that most of the separated items can't be sold, so they are then thrown into the central landfill anyway. So all that work of separation was for naught.
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>>>The other one was the toilet seat
The only thing I remember about that episode is Penn swabbing the fine-looking ass of a model. Mmmmm. BUT if I recall correctly, the point was that cold dry areas are not really contagious, and it's stupid to be afraid of trivial stuff (like getting hit on the head by a meteorite). Penn & Teller is a hit-or-miss show but even when they miss, they are funny. And at least they make you *think* unlike most TV today. "ORGASMS" is the episode I did not like. No particular reason... just felt that it has no real point for existing, plus I was turned-off by the disgusting closeups of guys/gals orgasming and so I never watched it again.
Vice-versa I really liked that Cheerleader episode. I didn't realize that cheerleading was the most dangerous sport in high school or that it's unregulated by the government. It is rather ridiculous we put our young women into such a dangerous hobby/sport and don't bother to protect them despite injury after injury after injury
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You forgot something: a big, fat "fuck you, assholes!"
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Uh, No ASCAP, RIAA, MPAAA, and BSA. If you read the Constitution of the United States of America, you will instantly recognize that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act undermines Copyright.
What is the purpose of copyright? To encourage artists to create more useful arts which after a limited monopoly turn over to the public domain.
By encouraging creative commons and similar licensing schemes, the original intent of Copyright as defined in the Constitution is actually being fulfilled.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
yeah everyone knows cory doctrov is an insufferable asshole. but why are you judging all cc users to be same as him?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
From the "words I've only heard spoken, not seen in print" department: It's "death throes," not "throws". I'm not being a dick about it, I promise, I'm just teaching you a new word. :)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/throes
It's not my intention to pick on you and I freely admit I'm being a spelling nazi.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Don't feed the trolls.
I'm off-topic, you're insightful *sigh*. Anyway, to further damage my karma: Around here, separation is required because it's easier to recycle glass when it's not among other refuse. Same with tin, paper, and aluminum. Everything else goes in the landfill. Even though it takes a loss on everything but tin, the recycling center here does recycle glass, tin, paper, and aluminum. Someone, somewhere has to separate the items in order for that to happen, unless there's a magic machine that can separate them. Those are in progress, but not used here.
He has a point that the only item of value that can be sold is tin. But the purpose of recycling is to reuse materials, not turn a profit. If you are recycling everything that gets separated, individually, like around here, then his point is completely irrelevant. You separate everything, none of what you separated goes in the landfill, you're saving the recycling center money by doing part of the work for them.
It's still less expensive to get more glass from the ground, but we're lowering our footprint not running a business.
Yeah it's off topic, get over it we're having a discussion here.
And now we have two! :-)
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV