My father-in-law is Japanese and technically ambidextrous... as they say, you couldn't really survive at home or at school if you were left-handed... but he never quite got rid of the ability, so he's functional with both hands. I lucked out in that way, being left-handed, because he isn't as strict about that was some other families we visited there, where I got downright nasty looks for eating with my left hand (they'd never say anything cause I think they were afraid the crazy gaijin might snap and kill them all).
Anyway, from what I understand from my father-in-law, if you're left-handed in Japan, you're likely ambidextrous as well.
Yeah, it seems they're either making the problem out to be more than it is, or they're not explaining it properly. About two years ago I was working with some guys to make museum installations where we stuck a cheap Canon DV cam at the bottom of a mirrorball lens thing (like they use for seamless panorama), and streamed the video over the web, so you could look around a room in realtime, see people staring at the camera etc. It's neat, but not at all hard to do. So I'm guessing this thing's something much fancier...
There's this idea that the artist somehow needs to be compensated for his work and that's fine but why not do it off ticket sales for concerts?
I was with you until that line. There are a lot of situations where the artist isn't going to be able to tour, or not tour to certain locations where they have some fans. The purpose of buying the songs should be "I am not able to attend your concert, but I do like your music, so I will purchase this track to show my support instead of being there in person."
So the question is: does the price set by the label smack you in the face when you consider that sentiment, or is it low enough that you say, "That feels about right" and buy it?
It's a wonderful two-pronged attack: the goose's contract to turn out eggs expires ahead of the other egg-laying beasts in the kingdom, so insist they turn out platinum from now on. This drives people to the chicken and the ostrich - because they have no such platinum requirements for at least another year or two - and puts the goose's monopoly on eggs in the crapper. In three years, none of the birds will have any great advantage over one another, and platinum will be the new standard. Win/Win!
Might just be me, but I've never seen AdWords on the Google cache pages. You do see them on search results page, but the act of linking to various pages on your site isn't commercial exploitation of your content. It's a clever distinction on their part that is probably designed to keep people from suing them for cashing in on other people's content.
How do you figure that's reproducing it commercially? They don't ask for money to view it, they're not packaging it as their own, and they're not putting on paper and selling it in bookstores. I don't see anything about their behaviour that suggests a commercial exploitation. The closest you get is that they're a for-profit company. But that doesn't mean they profit from every facet of their operations...
The problem is that you're a few steps behind the logic curve on this issue*. I shall try and illustrate it for you:
In the beginning, music was tied to a chunk of plastic. Then, the plastic was made optional and you could buy it online (with negligible distribution costs)... but to avoid gutting the existing plastic sales, the prices were fixed similarly.
There was an initial resistance to bits vs plastic because everyone thought the real cost was in the pressing and printing and cover art... but that's faded in the past 2 years. Now that the plastic-free version has taken off and people are starting to appreciate that they're paying for the music and not the disc, the question becomes "What is the music worth to you?"
It's not relative to other plastic discs, it's relative to other pursuits of happiness. If you LOVE this song, it's gotta be worth more than $0.99.
In other words, they had trouble getting over the lack of plastic at first, and now they're so excited about "apples vs oranges" economics that they're DYING to try out selling Coldplay for $3/track. And while YOU won't do it, there are a bunch of "I gots me an AOL" folks who WILL, and that's all you need to make it worthwhile.
I agree with Jobs on this, and I agree with you, but I think everyone underestimates how astoundingly greedy the RIAA can be.
* in all fairness, if you weren't behind the curve, you'd likely be a bad person
Exactly! "Support" is a misleading term, because a lot of what is done under that label has nothing to do with "It broke! Why?". Most product-based industries involve many different types of people who create, implement, sell and support something... and it's very rarely the same people all the way along. You'd never say to a dairy farmer: "You need to open a supermarket and run that seven days a week so you can make money selling milk."
There are lots of different ways to support your code, but it doesn't change the fact that some people just plain suck at that kind of work, but are genius programmers anyway. It's not a failing of the individual person, either... it's a failing of the environment that makes it impossible for the gifted innovators to sustain themselves simply on the basis of what they excel at.
Aha! Exactly the point I've been trying to make, and phrased perfectly! If you spend your time professionally supporting your own code, your coding time is your hobby just as much as working for Company X and programming at night.
Now, to extend that a bit further: if there were a mechanism by which you, as a programmer, could work at your code full-time, people would then naturally assume "conceptual integrity", "professionalism" and you'd have far more time (and fewer restrictions) to achieve proper "innovation".
So really, this comes down to earning money from lines written, which requires something akin to a royalty set-up, which is immensely do-able, but I'm sure will never be implemented because there's a bizarre dislike of all things monetary built into the mind of the average GPL proponent. Which is not to say ALL of them, but a great many.
So yes. Keep on supporting the code. It's your best bet.
Indeed! According to the original story, the last of the series is due Sept 20th. There is hope yet (even if somewhat depressing)
I recall someone telling me once the best part about playing Myst was just to "feel" it through their headphones... the experience was far more than just the game itself.
I think the issue here is becoming a somewhat common one on the internet. Sure, the files are in a public place, and sure, if you want them private, keep them private. But just because something can be copied indefinitely with little or no cost to the "owner" doesn't mean that it absolves you, the "user" of saying please and thank-you. It's not a question of bandwidth or credit or any of those things that irks you in this situation, it's that someone just came into your house, took one of the free beers you said you had in your fridge, and walked out the door without even looking in your direction. What made it worse was that they trucked mud through your house, and slammed the door loudly on the way out... but the lack of civility is what makes it so infuriating.
The company that added that game to the Fuddruckers site probably assumed if they asked permission to use the game, they'd get hit up for money they didn't want to pay. So since the game was freely-playable via the site anyway, they'd save themselves the trouble of a "no" and link straight to it. It's the fear of the answer that made them avoid being polite, but it's ultimately what lead them to this trouble in the first place. Unlimited copyability does not absolve you from your basic duty to be polite, and they didn't see it that way.
Now, as for his reaction, I guess it depends on whether you prefer an Old Testament God vs. a New Testament God... but the fact is, if they'd asked for permission first, this never would have happened, and everyone would be talking more about Ballmer throwing chairs.
For me, it was that there was finally a game similar to the Sierra games for Mac. As in "a game". At all. But at the time, despite its drawbacks, it was superbly done, if not a bit slow. Maybe it was the videos in the books that made it so neat?
Might be totally off-base, but try this page and look at units sold. If you knock the games off the list that came out, say, after 2000, then it's a pretty decent standing.
Of course, that was just the first hit I found after looking on Google, so it could be totally off.
I remember taking a tour of their "studio" way back in the early Myst days... I worked at a similar shop, and we'd been talking about doing stuff like that for months, and then BOOM! there it was... better than we could have imagined. They used all the common tools of the day in fantastic ways... after I got that game, I spent the rest of my workdays playing it. Research, y'know. But they weren't just crazy minds, they were very nice guys, too.
Then again, it's not like they've died or anything... but it's still sad to see them go.
I'd imagine that has less to do with politics and more to do with rules about advertising in various districts they might hit. Advertising tobacco, at least, is heavily restricted all over the place. And the rules for alcohol are pretty diverse as well... I'd hate to take a chance that my geo-targeted ad went astray and tried to sell something in a market where advertising that product was restricted or illegal.
That got me to thinking: who are the best indie game developers everyone can think of? I mean, not a major studio-like. If the real innovation isn't coming from EA, where's it hiding?
You could get the budget down if you gave the workers a percentage of the profits from the work they did. Rather than expect $60K/year job making textures, you could get $40K/year plus residuals. It would make everyone work harder, because you're only as successful as your last game.
But really, you don't want to give the creator control of the intellectual property, you want to give the creatorS a stake in their properties. It's a collaboration between the money and the art, and it can't reasonably swing too much either way.
I can't speak to the accuracy of the website (except for obvious things like you pointed out), but I know that for at least elements of the movie relating to the LRV, they talked to a lot of the engineers that designed and developed it, to get it right. And it's not easy, either... much of the work that went into those missions is either lost in massive piles of documentation or just plain lost. So I'm willing to bet the movie does a great job conveying the reality of it.
Why the patronising, as if people that wish to give their stuff under the CC are idiots, who are not aware and consient of what they are doing?
Well, in many cases, I'm sure they are fully aware of what they're doing. In that respect, I'm mostly worried that well-intentioned people don't live with a misconception about what they're actually doing with CC-SA. If you staked a good part of your livelihood on a false premise, you could get burned. But that's not the case with you, obviously.
Artists do what they do for the love of it, not for the money. But the money is what lets them keep doing it... they either work 40 hours weeks and come home to be a hobbyist artist, or they make a living off their art. But in neither situation are they necessarily in favour or opposed to compensation for their art... so yes, I can't generalize a group like that, assuming everyone cares about the pennies here and there.
But here's what still confuses me: why is it that some folks intentionally and deliberately overlay a vow of poverty on top of art? I don't mean this in a negative way (if that's how it sounds)... but why would you be so opposed to earning money from your work? It's not like the ideas thrown about would impose hardships on anyone, take away rights, or otherwise impede your ability to spread culture through your works. But I'm getting a lot of very passionate arguments against any sort of compensation AT ALL by the people who stand the most to gain by it. I understand "art for art's sake", but I don't see how it requires swearing off money entirely. Short of some magical Star Trek utopia, money is still needed to survive day-to-day.
(The only other issue being the question of performance-able art vs medium-based art and how you do a tip jar when the principle result of the art is always digital to begin with, but I won't say any more on that subject cause I've touched on it elsewhere)
There is nothing inherently wrong with commercial exploitation, just as, for example, there is nothing inherently wrong with racial or sexual discrimination.
That was very well done. Very seriously: you should write for a magazine somewhere. You've got a knack for brilliant bits of prose.
In this way they do indeed address commercial exploitation. They ensure that it's fair.
Fair only to those reselling, in that they have an even field. But it doesn't help the artist that created the work in the first place. Now you could argue that the artist should be paid before they work a la patronage, but that's a backward notion not suited to a very large population. Too many great artists would fall through the cracks that way. So then you could say that they get paid for performing the work of art somehow, but that brings me back to my 2nd-grade talent show...
My particular talent at the time was drawing. I was (at the time) really good at all sorts of visual arts. So when it came time for the talent show, others said they'd do dance, singing, skip-rope... I said I would do a painting. "No," said the teacher, "you can't paint in front of an audience for ten minutes at a talent show. You need to PERFORM!". So instead, I learned to juggle at the last minute, and had a miserable time.
Some art is not suited to performance, so the artist falls back on a physical copy of the art. In the digital world, that copy tends to have no value. You can say the first copy gets sold to "supporters" for an exorbitant price, but that's patronage, and it is inefficient and flawed on a large scale.
If we're keeping copyright around as a stick to enforce CC-SA, why not keep it around to enforce royalty payments built on the same principles? Make it simple, generic, and frictionless; don't change the non-commercial rights... just create a structure that lets the artists build upon one another's work in a way that puts food on the table if the work is ever sold. It imposes no restraints on anyone in the system that they would (hopefully) not feel obligated to live by anyway. But, like the CC-SA, it needs teeth so it can prevent abuse.
If someone at the grocery store drops a dime out of their wallet while paying for food, even though it's touched the ground and is technically free-for-all, you DO give it back to them, right?
You may believe in denying your fellow man a living from your gifts, but not everyone shares that approach. Be careful before you denounce their work ethic.
I don't believe in denying them that right. In fact, I want people to take my art, shake it around in their brains, and create something so fantastic it amazes the world how brilliant they are. I've put quite a lot of my money where my mouth is in this regard, with no regrets. I fully believe in the CC-SA fundamentals.
On the other hand, the work that I kicked off and some other person perfected is still a collaboration. They wouldn't have had the basis to make their product without mine as a foundation, so to some degree (and it's all relative), we're in it together, as authors.
I would think that anyone who believes in CC-SA would also gladly donate a portion of their earnings to those who helped make the money possible... not out of necessity, but an unforced moral obligation, almost. As a recognition of the collaboration that took place.
My concern (and we've gone round this block before, you and I) is that not everyone is as good-natured as a CC-SA fan, and that any CC license that doesn't try to address the question of commercial exploitation is putting artists at a disadvantage against the forces that are most likely to abuse CC.
the content becomes, in essence, a static resource, no longer your controlled expression. If a licensor can't handle that fact, which is a valid position, then they should really think twice about approaching free licenses.
I agree completely, yet I still think it's a failing of the licensing schemes that they are incapable of playing ball with the copyright world. It should be possible for someone to promote a free license for their work, permit remixing and adaptation, and expect no compensation except where profit is being made from their art. Safeway owes a debt to you for the carrots. Sometimes you'll set a price for them and demand payment up front, sometimes not. My argument is that it's fundamentally wrong to profit from someone else's efforts and give them nothing; and the free licences are absolving those doing the selling of any sort of guilt. I would think that even supporters of fully free culture would think that putting a check on corporate greed and exploitation would be a good thing...
There are thousands of artists out there who would absolutely LOVE for Sony to take their music and market it around the world without signing them to a pesky contract.
The assumption being that the artist has any way to cash in on the craze Sony creates. Many artists would believe they could, I'm sure, but it's not as easy as it sounds. And Sony is under no obligation to tell the public about your own personal website when they sell your music, so you might end up a long way down a Google search... IF the end-user bothered to check for you in the first place.
Let's say that first CD went platinum... next track you put on your site'll be on Virgin Radio before you could blink, and the song after that, and after that, and so on. And if you're still CC'ing them, NONE of those songs would earn you money either. You don't have the marketing power that Sony has. And the few dollars you earn from a few local gigs you land because you "sound like that song on the radio" won't come close to matching what the label execs are raking in from your work.
On the other hand, if you view a recorded song simply as marketing for your live performance, this is all good. But I'd think that anyone who's actually gone into a recording booth for hours to fine-tune their track wouldn't think that's just some disposable set of bytes. There's no problem with INDIVIDUALS shuffling around your track for free, in my view, because THAT is marketing. But as soon as someone starts to charge money for it, they've crossed the line into pure commercialism, and they do not deserve a free ride on your back.
Slashdot Mirror
My father-in-law is Japanese and technically ambidextrous... as they say, you couldn't really survive at home or at school if you were left-handed... but he never quite got rid of the ability, so he's functional with both hands. I lucked out in that way, being left-handed, because he isn't as strict about that was some other families we visited there, where I got downright nasty looks for eating with my left hand (they'd never say anything cause I think they were afraid the crazy gaijin might snap and kill them all).
Anyway, from what I understand from my father-in-law, if you're left-handed in Japan, you're likely ambidextrous as well.
Yeah, it seems they're either making the problem out to be more than it is, or they're not explaining it properly. About two years ago I was working with some guys to make museum installations where we stuck a cheap Canon DV cam at the bottom of a mirrorball lens thing (like they use for seamless panorama), and streamed the video over the web, so you could look around a room in realtime, see people staring at the camera etc. It's neat, but not at all hard to do. So I'm guessing this thing's something much fancier...
There's this idea that the artist somehow needs to be compensated for his work and that's fine but why not do it off ticket sales for concerts?
I was with you until that line. There are a lot of situations where the artist isn't going to be able to tour, or not tour to certain locations where they have some fans. The purpose of buying the songs should be "I am not able to attend your concert, but I do like your music, so I will purchase this track to show my support instead of being there in person."
So the question is: does the price set by the label smack you in the face when you consider that sentiment, or is it low enough that you say, "That feels about right" and buy it?
It's a wonderful two-pronged attack: the goose's contract to turn out eggs expires ahead of the other egg-laying beasts in the kingdom, so insist they turn out platinum from now on. This drives people to the chicken and the ostrich - because they have no such platinum requirements for at least another year or two - and puts the goose's monopoly on eggs in the crapper. In three years, none of the birds will have any great advantage over one another, and platinum will be the new standard. Win/Win!
It's greed, but it's brilliantly strategic greed.
"AdWords"
Might just be me, but I've never seen AdWords on the Google cache pages. You do see them on search results page, but the act of linking to various pages on your site isn't commercial exploitation of your content. It's a clever distinction on their part that is probably designed to keep people from suing them for cashing in on other people's content.
How do you figure that's reproducing it commercially? They don't ask for money to view it, they're not packaging it as their own, and they're not putting on paper and selling it in bookstores. I don't see anything about their behaviour that suggests a commercial exploitation. The closest you get is that they're a for-profit company. But that doesn't mean they profit from every facet of their operations...
The problem is that you're a few steps behind the logic curve on this issue*. I shall try and illustrate it for you:
In the beginning, music was tied to a chunk of plastic. Then, the plastic was made optional and you could buy it online (with negligible distribution costs)... but to avoid gutting the existing plastic sales, the prices were fixed similarly.
There was an initial resistance to bits vs plastic because everyone thought the real cost was in the pressing and printing and cover art... but that's faded in the past 2 years. Now that the plastic-free version has taken off and people are starting to appreciate that they're paying for the music and not the disc, the question becomes "What is the music worth to you?"
It's not relative to other plastic discs, it's relative to other pursuits of happiness. If you LOVE this song, it's gotta be worth more than $0.99.
In other words, they had trouble getting over the lack of plastic at first, and now they're so excited about "apples vs oranges" economics that they're DYING to try out selling Coldplay for $3/track. And while YOU won't do it, there are a bunch of "I gots me an AOL" folks who WILL, and that's all you need to make it worthwhile.
I agree with Jobs on this, and I agree with you, but I think everyone underestimates how astoundingly greedy the RIAA can be.
* in all fairness, if you weren't behind the curve, you'd likely be a bad person
Exactly! "Support" is a misleading term, because a lot of what is done under that label has nothing to do with "It broke! Why?". Most product-based industries involve many different types of people who create, implement, sell and support something... and it's very rarely the same people all the way along. You'd never say to a dairy farmer: "You need to open a supermarket and run that seven days a week so you can make money selling milk."
There are lots of different ways to support your code, but it doesn't change the fact that some people just plain suck at that kind of work, but are genius programmers anyway. It's not a failing of the individual person, either... it's a failing of the environment that makes it impossible for the gifted innovators to sustain themselves simply on the basis of what they excel at.
Aha! Exactly the point I've been trying to make, and phrased perfectly! If you spend your time professionally supporting your own code, your coding time is your hobby just as much as working for Company X and programming at night.
Now, to extend that a bit further: if there were a mechanism by which you, as a programmer, could work at your code full-time, people would then naturally assume "conceptual integrity", "professionalism" and you'd have far more time (and fewer restrictions) to achieve proper "innovation".
So really, this comes down to earning money from lines written, which requires something akin to a royalty set-up, which is immensely do-able, but I'm sure will never be implemented because there's a bizarre dislike of all things monetary built into the mind of the average GPL proponent. Which is not to say ALL of them, but a great many.
So yes. Keep on supporting the code. It's your best bet.
Indeed! According to the original story, the last of the series is due Sept 20th. There is hope yet (even if somewhat depressing)
I recall someone telling me once the best part about playing Myst was just to "feel" it through their headphones... the experience was far more than just the game itself.
That's okay, I think his delivery had more panache.
I think the issue here is becoming a somewhat common one on the internet. Sure, the files are in a public place, and sure, if you want them private, keep them private. But just because something can be copied indefinitely with little or no cost to the "owner" doesn't mean that it absolves you, the "user" of saying please and thank-you. It's not a question of bandwidth or credit or any of those things that irks you in this situation, it's that someone just came into your house, took one of the free beers you said you had in your fridge, and walked out the door without even looking in your direction. What made it worse was that they trucked mud through your house, and slammed the door loudly on the way out... but the lack of civility is what makes it so infuriating.
The company that added that game to the Fuddruckers site probably assumed if they asked permission to use the game, they'd get hit up for money they didn't want to pay. So since the game was freely-playable via the site anyway, they'd save themselves the trouble of a "no" and link straight to it. It's the fear of the answer that made them avoid being polite, but it's ultimately what lead them to this trouble in the first place. Unlimited copyability does not absolve you from your basic duty to be polite, and they didn't see it that way.
Now, as for his reaction, I guess it depends on whether you prefer an Old Testament God vs. a New Testament God... but the fact is, if they'd asked for permission first, this never would have happened, and everyone would be talking more about Ballmer throwing chairs.
For me, it was that there was finally a game similar to the Sierra games for Mac. As in "a game". At all. But at the time, despite its drawbacks, it was superbly done, if not a bit slow. Maybe it was the videos in the books that made it so neat?
Might be totally off-base, but try this page and look at units sold. If you knock the games off the list that came out, say, after 2000, then it's a pretty decent standing.
Of course, that was just the first hit I found after looking on Google, so it could be totally off.
I remember taking a tour of their "studio" way back in the early Myst days... I worked at a similar shop, and we'd been talking about doing stuff like that for months, and then BOOM! there it was... better than we could have imagined. They used all the common tools of the day in fantastic ways... after I got that game, I spent the rest of my workdays playing it. Research, y'know. But they weren't just crazy minds, they were very nice guys, too.
Then again, it's not like they've died or anything... but it's still sad to see them go.
I'd imagine that has less to do with politics and more to do with rules about advertising in various districts they might hit. Advertising tobacco, at least, is heavily restricted all over the place. And the rules for alcohol are pretty diverse as well... I'd hate to take a chance that my geo-targeted ad went astray and tried to sell something in a market where advertising that product was restricted or illegal.
That got me to thinking: who are the best indie game developers everyone can think of? I mean, not a major studio-like. If the real innovation isn't coming from EA, where's it hiding?
You could get the budget down if you gave the workers a percentage of the profits from the work they did. Rather than expect $60K/year job making textures, you could get $40K/year plus residuals. It would make everyone work harder, because you're only as successful as your last game.
But really, you don't want to give the creator control of the intellectual property, you want to give the creatorS a stake in their properties. It's a collaboration between the money and the art, and it can't reasonably swing too much either way.
I can't speak to the accuracy of the website (except for obvious things like you pointed out), but I know that for at least elements of the movie relating to the LRV, they talked to a lot of the engineers that designed and developed it, to get it right. And it's not easy, either... much of the work that went into those missions is either lost in massive piles of documentation or just plain lost. So I'm willing to bet the movie does a great job conveying the reality of it.
Why the patronising, as if people that wish to give their stuff under the CC are idiots, who are not aware and consient of what they are doing?
Well, in many cases, I'm sure they are fully aware of what they're doing. In that respect, I'm mostly worried that well-intentioned people don't live with a misconception about what they're actually doing with CC-SA. If you staked a good part of your livelihood on a false premise, you could get burned. But that's not the case with you, obviously.
Artists do what they do for the love of it, not for the money. But the money is what lets them keep doing it... they either work 40 hours weeks and come home to be a hobbyist artist, or they make a living off their art. But in neither situation are they necessarily in favour or opposed to compensation for their art... so yes, I can't generalize a group like that, assuming everyone cares about the pennies here and there.
But here's what still confuses me: why is it that some folks intentionally and deliberately overlay a vow of poverty on top of art? I don't mean this in a negative way (if that's how it sounds)... but why would you be so opposed to earning money from your work? It's not like the ideas thrown about would impose hardships on anyone, take away rights, or otherwise impede your ability to spread culture through your works. But I'm getting a lot of very passionate arguments against any sort of compensation AT ALL by the people who stand the most to gain by it. I understand "art for art's sake", but I don't see how it requires swearing off money entirely. Short of some magical Star Trek utopia, money is still needed to survive day-to-day.
(The only other issue being the question of performance-able art vs medium-based art and how you do a tip jar when the principle result of the art is always digital to begin with, but I won't say any more on that subject cause I've touched on it elsewhere)
There is nothing inherently wrong with commercial exploitation, just as, for example, there is nothing inherently wrong with racial or sexual discrimination.
That was very well done. Very seriously: you should write for a magazine somewhere. You've got a knack for brilliant bits of prose.
In this way they do indeed address commercial exploitation. They ensure that it's fair.
Fair only to those reselling, in that they have an even field. But it doesn't help the artist that created the work in the first place. Now you could argue that the artist should be paid before they work a la patronage, but that's a backward notion not suited to a very large population. Too many great artists would fall through the cracks that way. So then you could say that they get paid for performing the work of art somehow, but that brings me back to my 2nd-grade talent show...
My particular talent at the time was drawing. I was (at the time) really good at all sorts of visual arts. So when it came time for the talent show, others said they'd do dance, singing, skip-rope... I said I would do a painting. "No," said the teacher, "you can't paint in front of an audience for ten minutes at a talent show. You need to PERFORM!". So instead, I learned to juggle at the last minute, and had a miserable time.
Some art is not suited to performance, so the artist falls back on a physical copy of the art. In the digital world, that copy tends to have no value. You can say the first copy gets sold to "supporters" for an exorbitant price, but that's patronage, and it is inefficient and flawed on a large scale.
If we're keeping copyright around as a stick to enforce CC-SA, why not keep it around to enforce royalty payments built on the same principles? Make it simple, generic, and frictionless; don't change the non-commercial rights... just create a structure that lets the artists build upon one another's work in a way that puts food on the table if the work is ever sold. It imposes no restraints on anyone in the system that they would (hopefully) not feel obligated to live by anyway. But, like the CC-SA, it needs teeth so it can prevent abuse.
If someone at the grocery store drops a dime out of their wallet while paying for food, even though it's touched the ground and is technically free-for-all, you DO give it back to them, right?
You may believe in denying your fellow man a living from your gifts, but not everyone shares that approach. Be careful before you denounce their work ethic.
I don't believe in denying them that right. In fact, I want people to take my art, shake it around in their brains, and create something so fantastic it amazes the world how brilliant they are. I've put quite a lot of my money where my mouth is in this regard, with no regrets. I fully believe in the CC-SA fundamentals.
On the other hand, the work that I kicked off and some other person perfected is still a collaboration. They wouldn't have had the basis to make their product without mine as a foundation, so to some degree (and it's all relative), we're in it together, as authors.
I would think that anyone who believes in CC-SA would also gladly donate a portion of their earnings to those who helped make the money possible... not out of necessity, but an unforced moral obligation, almost. As a recognition of the collaboration that took place.
My concern (and we've gone round this block before, you and I) is that not everyone is as good-natured as a CC-SA fan, and that any CC license that doesn't try to address the question of commercial exploitation is putting artists at a disadvantage against the forces that are most likely to abuse CC.
yeah, sorry, I meant to do it, but got distracted, and then it seemed like I was trying to antagonize people twice in the same thread.
the content becomes, in essence, a static resource, no longer your controlled expression. If a licensor can't handle that fact, which is a valid position, then they should really think twice about approaching free licenses.
I agree completely, yet I still think it's a failing of the licensing schemes that they are incapable of playing ball with the copyright world. It should be possible for someone to promote a free license for their work, permit remixing and adaptation, and expect no compensation except where profit is being made from their art. Safeway owes a debt to you for the carrots. Sometimes you'll set a price for them and demand payment up front, sometimes not. My argument is that it's fundamentally wrong to profit from someone else's efforts and give them nothing; and the free licences are absolving those doing the selling of any sort of guilt. I would think that even supporters of fully free culture would think that putting a check on corporate greed and exploitation would be a good thing...
There are thousands of artists out there who would absolutely LOVE for Sony to take their music and market it around the world without signing them to a pesky contract.
The assumption being that the artist has any way to cash in on the craze Sony creates. Many artists would believe they could, I'm sure, but it's not as easy as it sounds. And Sony is under no obligation to tell the public about your own personal website when they sell your music, so you might end up a long way down a Google search... IF the end-user bothered to check for you in the first place.
Let's say that first CD went platinum... next track you put on your site'll be on Virgin Radio before you could blink, and the song after that, and after that, and so on. And if you're still CC'ing them, NONE of those songs would earn you money either. You don't have the marketing power that Sony has. And the few dollars you earn from a few local gigs you land because you "sound like that song on the radio" won't come close to matching what the label execs are raking in from your work.
On the other hand, if you view a recorded song simply as marketing for your live performance, this is all good. But I'd think that anyone who's actually gone into a recording booth for hours to fine-tune their track wouldn't think that's just some disposable set of bytes. There's no problem with INDIVIDUALS shuffling around your track for free, in my view, because THAT is marketing. But as soon as someone starts to charge money for it, they've crossed the line into pure commercialism, and they do not deserve a free ride on your back.