Month: October 2005

I’ll explain later.

Technorati Tags: free culture

JibJab fail to share alike:

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

“Barney” the dinosaur teaches you how to sue copyright infringers:

Barney’s Temper Tantrum

Pootergeek can’t take a photograph:

Suppressing Dissent

“Happy Birthday” is still under copyright, via Boing Boing:

Dear ASCAP: May I sing Happy Birthday for my dad’s 75th?

Technorati Tags: free culture

One objection that it might seem to be possible to make to applying Stallmanian freedom to culture is that culture isn’t like code. You can’t get a team to write a book then release it and let its readers send in bug fixes.

Only you can. Modern films, cartoons, magazines, games, television programmes and albums are made by large teams all revising each other’s work. “Plussing”, Disney call it.
Historical culture is the same. This is effectively how Homeric verse was written, by a succession of authors improving on previous versions of poems. Or how Shakespeare built on existing stories to make new versions. Brilliant new versions, but 2.0 revisions all the same.

A painting might seem a less obvious example of “plussing”. But if you look at a painting of a crucifiction (or another standard scene) it is a derivative work, building on hundreds or thousands of years of “original works”.

So there is no historical objection to a Free Culture. Outside of the commercially-inspired nineteenth century romantic myth of the creative genius.

How to make money off of CC-NC music:

1. Record the song under a statutory license and charge for your cover version.

2. Run a p2p or Internet Service Provider company that allows NC music to be moved across your network.

3. Manufacture MP3 players or blank CDs that can hold NC music.

4. Be a nonprofit organisation and argue that you charging for NC content isn’t “commercial”.

5. Be a musical instrument or software manufacturer who sells equipment to NC musicians.

Any more?

IANAL, but musicians don’t need to NC their music. They can SA the recording and then re-record it proprietary later. NC-ing is either cynical and self-defeating, as described above, or idealistic and self-defeating, failing to provide an alternative to capitalism/globalism/whatever.

NC may be CC’s most popular license module, but it is time for CC to put NC into maintenance mode and start building a real cultural commons rather than the cultural allotments of NC.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Copyright is traditionally intended to apply to Mass Culture. That is, mass-produced commercial culture. Mass Culture is appropriated Folk Culture, it is kitsch by definition.

Folk Culture is a network externality to Mass Culture. It is a commons, shared and unexploited, built anonymously by individuals as part of their personal and shared experience. It has value, but if you try to measure it you change it.

(There’s private culture, private use of culture. We’ll collapse that into folk culture to keep to the magic number of three.)

Then there’s High Culture. Often drawing on the others, often drawn on by the others. The art of the ruling class, and/or of the avant-garde. Neither mass-produced nor a product of everyday life.

Copyright is spilling over from Mass to Folk (including private, indeed particularly to private) and High culture. It’s cutting off its own supply of source material and failing to provide substitutes for what it is trying to displace. Trying to prevent value being taken whilst failing to recognise that it takes value itself.

Technorati Tags: free culture

So culture is a commons, and there is a movement devoted to reclaiming that commons from enclosure and the excesses of law.

In the UK, historically, the Chartists and the Levellers were groups that worked to reclaim the commons. And the allotment movement was an attempt to provide a substitute.

So are “copyfighters” digital Levellers? And are Creative Commons the cultural allotment movement? I hope not. But this comparison may help explain the popularity of the CC NonCommercial license.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Successful free licenses are a result of the Three Cs: Community, (social) Contract, and Crisis.

For the GPL, hackers shared code until intellectual property law and NDAs started preventing this.

For the OGL, gamers wrote and consumed roleplaying game scenarios for Dungeons & Dragons until TSR’s impending bankruptcy threatened this.

For the CC Sampling license, musical appropriators transformed music through sampling until the U2 vs. Negativland case threatened this.

In each case, the resulting license restores the social contract and protects the community. Free licenses are a defensive, reformist measure. They seem to work best when used as such.

(Previously: Motive, Subject and The Creative Commons Licenses)

Technorati Tags: free culture