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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.
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
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.
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
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?