Month: August 2005

There is an important difference between the Creative Commons licenses and several other leading “Free” licenses.

The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in response to non-disclosure of code harming programmers ability to work as they had before. He wrote the GPL to ensure that programmers could continue to program.

The OGL was written by Ryan Dancey in response to the financial collapse of the games company TSR threatening gamers ability to play and write role-playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. He wrote the OGL to ensure that gamers and game authors could continue to work with D&D.

The Creative Commons licenses were written by Larry Lessig in respone to overly strong copyright threatening individuals ability to exercise their fair use rights and gain access to works in the public domain. He wrote the CC licenses to counteract this.

In each of these cases there was a “printer driver moment”; for Stallman not being able to get the code to a laser printer driver (hence the name), for Dancey realising that the collapse of TSR could lock D&D away for ever, and for Lessig the Eric Eldred case where “orphan works” would be lost to unknown rightsholders.

So the GPL was written by a programmer so he could continue to program in the way he was used to. And the OGL was written by a gamer and games author so he could continue playing and writing games as he was used to. But the CC licenses were not written by and for their subject. Eldred did not write the licenses, Lessig did.

This difference explains the character of the CC licenses and their presentation. And some of their strengths. And, if you believe the CC licenses are flawed, some of their flaws. Despite being an author, Lessig is primarily a lawyer and does not have to “eat his own dog food” using his licenses in his day job. Any weaknesses in the CC licenses will not affect Lessig’s ability to practice law. But the GPL or the OGL could bite their authors hard if they have any flaws.

This is not to say that the CC licenses are bad or morally defective. In their own way they are excellent. And they are head and shoulders above half-hearted licenses like Sun’s execrable CDDL. But being written for an audience rather than written by their subject has affected their genetic makeup, and this is a factor that is worth considering when discussing them.

Viral marketing debasing Wikipedia:

BB Punks Wikipedia?

Words don’t fail me, but nor does politeness. I’ll just mention Bzzzagents and leave it at that.

Hopefully the self-healing nature of Wikipedia will sort this out quickly.

Technorati Tags: free culture, wikis

Stuff The Suits

I heard a recording executive say on the radio that they were no longer looking for talent but rather for a look and a willingness to cooperate, because with Pro Tools they can fix anything.– Joni Mitchell.

Although the point of Punk was that anyone could form a band, the point wasn’t then that any band could be fed through Pro Tools and sold to the idiot masses.

When discussing incentives and protection, it is important to consider who those incentives and that protection are being given to. And what they are being incentivised to do. And what they are being protected from.

Technorati Tags: free culture

I’m not a Marxist. I don’t know Marx and his followers’ work well enough to be able to say whether Marxism makes any more sense than the Cult Of The Invisible Hand. But trawling the web for articles on aesthetics I found this Trotskyite essay on the value of culture that starts from a debate on the virtues of Oscar Wilde:

http://www.music.gla.ac.uk/~tfowler/articles/Aesthetic.html

Giving Wilde to the workers is an example of redistribution of wealth. In this instance it is cultural wealth rather than monetary wealth. I suppose peer-to-peer networks are a degenerate form of redistribution of cultural wealth, but by individuals, not the state.

“Remix Culture” as the official culture of Creative Commons, seems to be about ownership of the means of production, not redistribution of wealth. Is it better to mash up an Eminem song or to read a chapter of Don Quixote? Free Culture would say Mr. Mathers. High Culture would say the Knight of The Sorrowful Face.

Both have a point. Grab Don Quixote from Project Gutenberg then do that mash-up. Redistribute the cultural wealth of millennia, and seize the means of production for the future.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, free culture

Copyfight on the DMCA being misused to threaten someone who used some boxes to make furinture:

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/08/11/dumb_ideas_never_die.php

Technorati Tags: free culture