Reason two would indicate that Sony was not displaying the CC license on their copy, which I believe is an infringement of the license and so they are liable for prosecution.
Or, Sony display the required information about the CC license, but the general masses don't have a clue what it means... besides which, they've already bought it by this point, and can't be bothered to hunt down the original author anyway. It's a question of convenience, at that stage.
This is a somewhat outdated business model which doesn't really encourage the creation of anything.
I don't think the basic social contract is at all outdated. In the days before we invented recording, you would pay the performers while they played in front of you, or they'd give up playing music and become shepherds. Nowadays we have the ability to "perform" for people around the world, rather than just down in the pub, so the same notion needs to be addressed: if you don't pay them, they'll become accountants.
The whole concept of patronage was/is a brief flicker in history compared to the tip jar. The idea of buying the art on some "thing" like a CD distorts the basic underlying agreement: support your artists. You're not paying for the plastic of the disc or the bits of the AAC, you're (supposedly) dropping a coin in the performer's hat.
So back to the point: a CC-C-SA or GPL product requires a re-user to give proper credit, but it also frees them of the responsibility to support the artist they're using. And these days (as in all days, really), if you don't have some force of law at your disposal, trusting people to do the right thing is a flawed concept. It's telling the kids the cookie jar is open, and assuming they'll only eat one.
In an attempt to serve the Greater Good, even the wisest people can make themselves into unintentional sacrifices. Too many people think the license means what they believe it to mean, rather than what it says. It's like anti-FUD, and it's just as dangerous, especially when repeated by otherwise smart people.
Let's say you have a farm with an abundance of carrots. So many, in fact, that you put a sign out by the road saying: "If you're hungry, take one!". Free-for-all. Maybe someone's gone without lunch, and this'll help them out. It's good for the community, and it makes you feel good.
You wake up one morning to find the local Safeway loading half your crop onto a truck. They're going to sell it all in their stores, and make a handsome profit cause it was free to begin with....the person doing the selling may be providing an important service by marketing the product, but their contribution cannot stand on its own. I can't sell carrots if I have no carrots.
Can someone take a freely-licensed work and sell it without remitting anything to the author? Sure. But is it right?
CC tends not to reply to questions like that (I have been lucky enough to get a "we don't answer that kinda thing" email or two over the years), but from my discussions with lawyerly people (IANAL, naturally), the opinion is that the ads are not something you see in exchange for the content, therefore they aren't considered payment for the content, so they're merely peripheral elements to the website and do not violate the NC license.
On the other hand, it doesn't stop someone from deciding otherwise and suing you. Best bet is to contact those people whose licenses are NC and ask them if it's okay. It defeats the purpose of the license, but that element is left too vague as-is, so better safe than sorry.
you don't go overboard and turn musicians away from a powerful promotional tool.
True, that's a big danger. I really am trying to not sound so alarmist. You shoulda heard me last week! Woo!
I don't see how a license that took pages of legalese to say, "Ask me first" would serve anybody, including the people who wanted to be asked first.
But that's what CC-NC-SA does right now. You can still use it for commercial purposes, but you have to ask first. It would still be extremely easy to pick a CC-C-SA license and continue on that path, but right now people wanting to share without giving up any royalty rights have an on/off situation, which seems to me to go against what CC is about.
Nor do I see any hope for the royalties license. Since everybody is going to have a slightly different idea of what constitutes a proper royalty formula
True, but the same could be said about the Attribution, ShareAlike or Commercial elements of the license already. The thing would be to give the user a field to type in a percentage number... then in the license plain text, it could plainly state: "If you use this work for commercial purposes, you should pay me X% of your profits, should there be any". It's very simple, takes care of a lot of needs very simply, and doesn't slow anything down. If that's still not good enough, the user could go with CC-NC-SA and negotiate controls on a case-by-case basis.
But above and beyond that, these additional licenses simply fly in the face of the goals of the Creative Commons.
I don't think they do at all! Creative Commons is about sharing the creative works of our societies in ways that traditional copyright doesn't allow. It's not about impoverishing our artists for the sake of free-flowing information. It's about free (speech), not NECESSARILY free (beer). If CC can be enhanced to make commercial use of art as simple as it has made basic licensing, it will be one major nail in the coffin of (C).
If you think a series of royalties boilerplates would be useful to the world, have a lawyer draw them up, and publish them for anyone to use.
I'm on it (but from what I hear, so is CC).
I, personally, use CC-NC-SA because I want to retain some level of control over how my work is used commercially. So I'm not really worried about another license. I'm worried about my fellow artists who have a distorted impression about what their chosen license does for them. You're right, they would get taken advantage of by a big company with a traditional agreement, but that's no excuse for being royally screwed again, while trying to be noble.
I don't think CC necessarily has to change, but I think it needs to be clearly spelled out for its users: CC-C-SA means you will NEVER earn money for your work except in a tip-jar arrangement, and if your work is widely sold for millions of dollars, you do NOT have any legal right to royalties. If everyone had to read that statement and agree to it before using a CC-C-SA license, I'd sleep easier. We're turning a lot of vulnerable artists into sheep in a wolf's meadow with the vague descriptions of how CC operates.
It's not that someone expects that people will donate money to them, it's that they probably don't expect that a large company that earns millions of dollars off their work will not even send a thank-you note in return, because the sense of common courtesy that we take for granted doesn't envelope the whole world in a bug, lovey commonsfest.
As for buying Ferraris... I admit this applies more to CC than GPL... but all it takes is for Sony Music to pick up a set of tracks from an artist and make a sudden marketing blitz around the world, and they'd be quite wealthy indeed. Sure, the competitors could sell the same songs too, but first-mover advantage would still help Sony win the day.
Once you go outside the well-connected world of the internet, lots of people don't understand what a CC license is, or that you could just download that song rather than buying it for $25.00 at HMV. A huge market waiting to be exploited.
"Adding on the non-commercial restriction is supposed to let the creator earn money on the work, but far more often it just makes potential derivers look for alternatives, along with hampering the overall goal."
Which is exactly why CC needs further development in the C/NC area. If the licences are meant to make it easier to tell what you can and can not use a work for, they're only going half the distance right now. A system needs to be added that lets potential commercial users understand the standard costs of the product.
The system would have to continue to promote friction-less approaches, such as a flat percentage of total profits. So there's no cost to experiment, and the final bill is predictable. And if the end product doesn't earn a cent, neither do the contributing artists.
CC was envisioned more to help consumers understand their rights in copying MP3 from the net, and kinda glossed over the whole idea that industries might accept and work with CC-licensed products. It needs to evolve to take that into account.
But a big concern is that many artists don't actually KNOW what they're signing up for. I've talked to a lot of artists lately who thought that CC-C-SA was the best thing since three-buttoned mice, but also had this crazy notion that it somehow required Sony to pay you royalties if they pressed 10 million copies of your CD and sold it all over the world. But you don't have any protection there, so you're screwed.
The real issue is that CC stops short of addressing compensation in all this. We're all quite good at giving proper credit to those involved, but CC and GPL don't address the basic social contract concept of paying for what you use. If you could say: "Use freely", "Use only with per-case permission", or "Use with this standard royalty formula", the licenses would actually be fully useful, and the creator would have a full deck to play with.
I put this out here partly on a dare, and partly because it relates. The key flaw in all these systems is that the creators are assuming that the people that use them will click a "donate" button on their website. But that's not the case, and in situations like the GPL or the CC-C-SA, you're effectively letting others buy Ferraris off your hard work. It doesn't seem to occur to many of these good-natured folks that they're being taken advantage of by less-scrupulous companies.
More likely they'd pick it up, say to each other, "Look! The beings that made this probe kindly included some of their primitive art with it! I shall put this shiny disc sculpture in the frame above my desk and think of it fondly!"
'Cause a CD is oso very intuitively a storage medium.
... if you think of all the valuable itches that will go un-scratched in the pursuit of this DRM utopia, it's truly depressing. I don't think the open source community is a right fit for this particular endeavour anyway... once the first iteration is cracked, we'll all call out, "See? Told ya so. It'll never work." and go back to making more PHP CMSes. We should be investing time in better licensing meta data and compromises on rhetoric, rather than trying to race the content industries to make the more perfect sinking ship.
So the logical next step is to hook the whole contraption up to a GPS system and if they continue walking in the forbidden direction, it just keeps cranking up the level of the pulse until it could no longer be ignored, knocking the subject right over. It's basically just an electronic vertigo machine... I wonder... if you took Gravol first, would you feel the effects as much?
"There's no arrest warrant for (Lynn) and there are no charges filed and no case pending," Granick said. "There may never be. But they got a complaint and as a result they were doing some investigation."
In other words, probably not really in trouble with the FBI.
Actually, speaking from personal experience, fans of football, wrestling and other fantastic beat-them-up sports often do not understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary participation. I've suffered a broken arm from a fool who thought he'd perform a wrestling move on me out of the blue.
But again, the question isn't whether the violence is good or bad, but whether the people watching it are smart enough to understand when and where to use it.
And that would be even better than TV commercials, because no one would ever risk getting up to go grab a snack while a level is loading... the audience is absurdly captive.
Of course if this idea makes it into a game somewhere, you realize you have to say 27 Hail Marys and do 5 lashes for voicing your sinful thoughts.
It was little loved by my brother, who woke up crying every night for days because Optimus died. On the other hand, it is one of the most quotable movies of all time. They just don't write scripts like they used to...
A wise man once said to me: "By the time you finally TRULY understand the rules of the game, you'll be too tired to play."
So I might extrapolate from your post that the ideal situation for grey-haired veterans is to corral the young'ns, wait for the leader to emerge, and have a lemming-thwacker ready before they get out of hand?
I could go for that.
Re:And Paramount's response?
on
P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
See, that's the missing fragment of genius in all this. Sure, selling a single DVD of the single pilot wouldn't be worth the money, but putting that episode out for download on the web for $1 would actually earn you money on your discarded shows.
There are so many pilots that die like that, just get put on shelves and are never seen again. I've had it happen twice. The frustrating part is, even if you only managed to wrangle $5,000 in the venture from people that really loved the show and were willing to pay for it, you'd still be earning $5,000 more than you would otherwise.
The kicker is the producers/broadcasters tend to pay the creators a rights fee every few years to keep the concept locked up, so they're probably leaking the same small amount of cash for dead pilots anyway...
Re:Then how is the production funded?
on
P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
I think you could safely float the number around $1M, and it could go up or down another few hundred thousand depending on production values, method of shooting, actors etc. You can definitely do an episode for much cheaper than that, but then the question is where you're going to cut your costs, and how that changes the overall quality. Administrative overhead eats quite a lot of any budget, but some of it is actually important work being done...
I have no inside knowledge of this at all, but it sounds to me like it's political posturing within SAG, pure and simple. One faction wants to appear militantly pro-membership (at the expense of all else), and they're in a position to throw their weight around. It's not really a question of reason or rightness or anything else, it's all about making a scene, drawing a line in the sand, and turning the other side into "pro-industry" stooges.
otherwise how do you know what the folks you're managing are supposed to be doing?
Likewise, how will you know what the folks who are managing are doing wrong? The best way to learn is from your mistakes. The safest way is to learn from someone else's.
Tom Green got his start doing a cable access show in Ottawa, Canada, which is about as small a market as you get. A friend of mine was a producer on the show for a year or two. The thing about that show was that it never stopped being a cable access show... it just moved from network to network, picking up a larger cable access-type audience as it went. If you can get one or two of those types of shows to a broader worldwide audience through this medium, I'm sure you could rival the ratings that Tom got when he had his big breakthrough on American TV. The only question is how to cash in on it...
Slashdot Mirror
Reason two would indicate that Sony was not displaying the CC license on their copy, which I believe is an infringement of the license and so they are liable for prosecution.
Or, Sony display the required information about the CC license, but the general masses don't have a clue what it means... besides which, they've already bought it by this point, and can't be bothered to hunt down the original author anyway. It's a question of convenience, at that stage.
This is a somewhat outdated business model which doesn't really encourage the creation of anything.
I don't think the basic social contract is at all outdated. In the days before we invented recording, you would pay the performers while they played in front of you, or they'd give up playing music and become shepherds. Nowadays we have the ability to "perform" for people around the world, rather than just down in the pub, so the same notion needs to be addressed: if you don't pay them, they'll become accountants.
The whole concept of patronage was/is a brief flicker in history compared to the tip jar. The idea of buying the art on some "thing" like a CD distorts the basic underlying agreement: support your artists. You're not paying for the plastic of the disc or the bits of the AAC, you're (supposedly) dropping a coin in the performer's hat.
So back to the point: a CC-C-SA or GPL product requires a re-user to give proper credit, but it also frees them of the responsibility to support the artist they're using. And these days (as in all days, really), if you don't have some force of law at your disposal, trusting people to do the right thing is a flawed concept. It's telling the kids the cookie jar is open, and assuming they'll only eat one.
In an attempt to serve the Greater Good, even the wisest people can make themselves into unintentional sacrifices. Too many people think the license means what they believe it to mean, rather than what it says. It's like anti-FUD, and it's just as dangerous, especially when repeated by otherwise smart people.
Let's say you have a farm with an abundance of carrots. So many, in fact, that you put a sign out by the road saying: "If you're hungry, take one!". Free-for-all. Maybe someone's gone without lunch, and this'll help them out. It's good for the community, and it makes you feel good.
...the person doing the selling may be providing an important service by marketing the product, but their contribution cannot stand on its own. I can't sell carrots if I have no carrots.
You wake up one morning to find the local Safeway loading half your crop onto a truck. They're going to sell it all in their stores, and make a handsome profit cause it was free to begin with.
Can someone take a freely-licensed work and sell it without remitting anything to the author? Sure. But is it right?
CC tends not to reply to questions like that (I have been lucky enough to get a "we don't answer that kinda thing" email or two over the years), but from my discussions with lawyerly people (IANAL, naturally), the opinion is that the ads are not something you see in exchange for the content, therefore they aren't considered payment for the content, so they're merely peripheral elements to the website and do not violate the NC license.
On the other hand, it doesn't stop someone from deciding otherwise and suing you. Best bet is to contact those people whose licenses are NC and ask them if it's okay. It defeats the purpose of the license, but that element is left too vague as-is, so better safe than sorry.
you don't go overboard and turn musicians away from a powerful promotional tool.
True, that's a big danger. I really am trying to not sound so alarmist. You shoulda heard me last week! Woo!
I don't see how a license that took pages of legalese to say, "Ask me first" would serve anybody, including the people who wanted to be asked first.
But that's what CC-NC-SA does right now. You can still use it for commercial purposes, but you have to ask first. It would still be extremely easy to pick a CC-C-SA license and continue on that path, but right now people wanting to share without giving up any royalty rights have an on/off situation, which seems to me to go against what CC is about.
Nor do I see any hope for the royalties license. Since everybody is going to have a slightly different idea of what constitutes a proper royalty formula
True, but the same could be said about the Attribution, ShareAlike or Commercial elements of the license already. The thing would be to give the user a field to type in a percentage number... then in the license plain text, it could plainly state: "If you use this work for commercial purposes, you should pay me X% of your profits, should there be any". It's very simple, takes care of a lot of needs very simply, and doesn't slow anything down. If that's still not good enough, the user could go with CC-NC-SA and negotiate controls on a case-by-case basis.
But above and beyond that, these additional licenses simply fly in the face of the goals of the Creative Commons.
I don't think they do at all! Creative Commons is about sharing the creative works of our societies in ways that traditional copyright doesn't allow. It's not about impoverishing our artists for the sake of free-flowing information. It's about free (speech), not NECESSARILY free (beer). If CC can be enhanced to make commercial use of art as simple as it has made basic licensing, it will be one major nail in the coffin of (C).
If you think a series of royalties boilerplates would be useful to the world, have a lawyer draw them up, and publish them for anyone to use.
I'm on it (but from what I hear, so is CC).
I, personally, use CC-NC-SA because I want to retain some level of control over how my work is used commercially. So I'm not really worried about another license. I'm worried about my fellow artists who have a distorted impression about what their chosen license does for them. You're right, they would get taken advantage of by a big company with a traditional agreement, but that's no excuse for being royally screwed again, while trying to be noble.
I don't think CC necessarily has to change, but I think it needs to be clearly spelled out for its users: CC-C-SA means you will NEVER earn money for your work except in a tip-jar arrangement, and if your work is widely sold for millions of dollars, you do NOT have any legal right to royalties. If everyone had to read that statement and agree to it before using a CC-C-SA license, I'd sleep easier. We're turning a lot of vulnerable artists into sheep in a wolf's meadow with the vague descriptions of how CC operates.
It's not that someone expects that people will donate money to them, it's that they probably don't expect that a large company that earns millions of dollars off their work will not even send a thank-you note in return, because the sense of common courtesy that we take for granted doesn't envelope the whole world in a bug, lovey commonsfest.
As for buying Ferraris... I admit this applies more to CC than GPL... but all it takes is for Sony Music to pick up a set of tracks from an artist and make a sudden marketing blitz around the world, and they'd be quite wealthy indeed. Sure, the competitors could sell the same songs too, but first-mover advantage would still help Sony win the day.
Once you go outside the well-connected world of the internet, lots of people don't understand what a CC license is, or that you could just download that song rather than buying it for $25.00 at HMV. A huge market waiting to be exploited.
"Adding on the non-commercial restriction is supposed to let the creator earn money on the work, but far more often it just makes potential derivers look for alternatives, along with hampering the overall goal."
Which is exactly why CC needs further development in the C/NC area. If the licences are meant to make it easier to tell what you can and can not use a work for, they're only going half the distance right now. A system needs to be added that lets potential commercial users understand the standard costs of the product.
The system would have to continue to promote friction-less approaches, such as a flat percentage of total profits. So there's no cost to experiment, and the final bill is predictable. And if the end product doesn't earn a cent, neither do the contributing artists.
CC was envisioned more to help consumers understand their rights in copying MP3 from the net, and kinda glossed over the whole idea that industries might accept and work with CC-licensed products. It needs to evolve to take that into account.
But a big concern is that many artists don't actually KNOW what they're signing up for. I've talked to a lot of artists lately who thought that CC-C-SA was the best thing since three-buttoned mice, but also had this crazy notion that it somehow required Sony to pay you royalties if they pressed 10 million copies of your CD and sold it all over the world. But you don't have any protection there, so you're screwed.
The real issue is that CC stops short of addressing compensation in all this. We're all quite good at giving proper credit to those involved, but CC and GPL don't address the basic social contract concept of paying for what you use. If you could say: "Use freely", "Use only with per-case permission", or "Use with this standard royalty formula", the licenses would actually be fully useful, and the creator would have a full deck to play with.
I put this out here partly on a dare, and partly because it relates. The key flaw in all these systems is that the creators are assuming that the people that use them will click a "donate" button on their website. But that's not the case, and in situations like the GPL or the CC-C-SA, you're effectively letting others buy Ferraris off your hard work. It doesn't seem to occur to many of these good-natured folks that they're being taken advantage of by less-scrupulous companies.
- our-gpl.html
Anyway, my fuller postulation on the subject is here: http://dustrunners.blogspot.com/2005/08/chains-in
(Mr Fitch: consider it done)
"Look at these strange inscriptions on the disc..."
"I will copy them down and have them translated immediately!"
"It's a pretty thing, but what a terribly inefficient writing surface they use. Haven't they heard of paper?"
"Imagine passing notes in class like this!"
"Ha ha! Clunk! Busted!"
"Ha! Indeed! Prepare the invasion fleet."
More likely they'd pick it up, say to each other, "Look! The beings that made this probe kindly included some of their primitive art with it! I shall put this shiny disc sculpture in the frame above my desk and think of it fondly!"
'Cause a CD is oso very intuitively a storage medium.
... if you think of all the valuable itches that will go un-scratched in the pursuit of this DRM utopia, it's truly depressing. I don't think the open source community is a right fit for this particular endeavour anyway... once the first iteration is cracked, we'll all call out, "See? Told ya so. It'll never work." and go back to making more PHP CMSes. We should be investing time in better licensing meta data and compromises on rhetoric, rather than trying to race the content industries to make the more perfect sinking ship.
So the logical next step is to hook the whole contraption up to a GPS system and if they continue walking in the forbidden direction, it just keeps cranking up the level of the pulse until it could no longer be ignored, knocking the subject right over. It's basically just an electronic vertigo machine... I wonder... if you took Gravol first, would you feel the effects as much?
"There's no arrest warrant for (Lynn) and there are no charges filed and no case pending," Granick said. "There may never be. But they got a complaint and as a result they were doing some investigation."
In other words, probably not really in trouble with the FBI.
Actually, speaking from personal experience, fans of football, wrestling and other fantastic beat-them-up sports often do not understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary participation. I've suffered a broken arm from a fool who thought he'd perform a wrestling move on me out of the blue.
But again, the question isn't whether the violence is good or bad, but whether the people watching it are smart enough to understand when and where to use it.
And that would be even better than TV commercials, because no one would ever risk getting up to go grab a snack while a level is loading... the audience is absurdly captive.
Of course if this idea makes it into a game somewhere, you realize you have to say 27 Hail Marys and do 5 lashes for voicing your sinful thoughts.
And thank you, because I had blissfully forgotten the theme till you mentioned it specifically.
I wonder if they're going to do a DVD release of that show any time soon. Poison the minds of another generation!
It was little loved by my brother, who woke up crying every night for days because Optimus died. On the other hand, it is one of the most quotable movies of all time. They just don't write scripts like they used to...
A wise man once said to me: "By the time you finally TRULY understand the rules of the game, you'll be too tired to play."
So I might extrapolate from your post that the ideal situation for grey-haired veterans is to corral the young'ns, wait for the leader to emerge, and have a lemming-thwacker ready before they get out of hand?
I could go for that.
See, that's the missing fragment of genius in all this. Sure, selling a single DVD of the single pilot wouldn't be worth the money, but putting that episode out for download on the web for $1 would actually earn you money on your discarded shows.
There are so many pilots that die like that, just get put on shelves and are never seen again. I've had it happen twice. The frustrating part is, even if you only managed to wrangle $5,000 in the venture from people that really loved the show and were willing to pay for it, you'd still be earning $5,000 more than you would otherwise.
The kicker is the producers/broadcasters tend to pay the creators a rights fee every few years to keep the concept locked up, so they're probably leaking the same small amount of cash for dead pilots anyway...
I think you could safely float the number around $1M, and it could go up or down another few hundred thousand depending on production values, method of shooting, actors etc. You can definitely do an episode for much cheaper than that, but then the question is where you're going to cut your costs, and how that changes the overall quality. Administrative overhead eats quite a lot of any budget, but some of it is actually important work being done...
I have no inside knowledge of this at all, but it sounds to me like it's political posturing within SAG, pure and simple. One faction wants to appear militantly pro-membership (at the expense of all else), and they're in a position to throw their weight around. It's not really a question of reason or rightness or anything else, it's all about making a scene, drawing a line in the sand, and turning the other side into "pro-industry" stooges.
otherwise how do you know what the folks you're managing are supposed to be doing?
Likewise, how will you know what the folks who are managing are doing wrong? The best way to learn is from your mistakes. The safest way is to learn from someone else's.
Tom Green got his start doing a cable access show in Ottawa, Canada, which is about as small a market as you get. A friend of mine was a producer on the show for a year or two. The thing about that show was that it never stopped being a cable access show... it just moved from network to network, picking up a larger cable access-type audience as it went. If you can get one or two of those types of shows to a broader worldwide audience through this medium, I'm sure you could rival the ratings that Tom got when he had his big breakthrough on American TV. The only question is how to cash in on it...