still/open

This is a short article I wrote for Dumbo Feather, Pass it On about Creative Commons:

Elliott Bledsoe

You’re online, you see some prose you like and you press ‘apple and c’. Copied. Simple as that. When the functionality of the internet lets content be copied as easily as that, it is hard to maintain the traditional “all rights reserved”/can’t touch this rhetoric of copyright. Sure, at law it’s a breach of copyright. But that doesn’t stop copying. There are a lot of internet users who don’t even realise that the copies they make are illegal. Copyright is dead.

Stop. Remix that. Copyright isn‚Äôt dead, it‚Äôs being (re)born. To the copyright traditionalists I say stop trying to stop copying, because you won’t. Start looking at regulating how people can copy. There is a mass of benefits to be gained by letting people have access to your content. The trick is knowing how to identify what bits to give away and what bits to keep. “But how?” you’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about copyright and I can’t afford a lawyer.” No problems, think Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is remixing copyright into a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists and which provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. For CC it’s about options. Want to be recognised as the author of your blog? Then require Attribution. Don’t want others making money from your animation? Easy. Put the work under a Non-Commercial term. Just want people to pass your novella around but don’t want them changing it? A No Derivatives licence will do that. And what if you want to see what people will do mashing up your work, but think they should share too? No problems, Share Alike compels them to let others remix anything they’ve made from your work.

But why stop there? Want to be acknowledged as the creator of your podcast and allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes? Put it under an Attribution-Non-Commercial licence and you’ve done just that. Using the CC licence generator on creativecommons.org, a mix and match of the permissions is as easy as answering a few questions.

At Creative Commons we don’t want to get rid of copyright, we want to remix it.

http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org.au

Elliott Bledsoe is a Project Officer with Creative Commons Australia. CC in Australia is part of the funded research under the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, www.cci.edu.au.

andy@engagemedia.org
May 2007

What happens when militantly free software, [1] the digital commons – a library stocked with applications, protocols, patterns and frameworks – and a community of interested, motivated peer collaborators are interwoven?

Digital fight-sharers imagine information theory, encoding algorithms and encryption technologies as a strong bridge of anonymity and privacy over a sea of public insecure data. Collectively from this networked media constellation robust peer to peer (p2p) distributed content sharing networks arise – organised using real-time networked audio-visual communications and content management system (CMS) to collaborate for low cost. In other words, we redesign the structure of our human telecommunications needs such that we understand and control all aspects of the infrastructure - a community-oriented convivial technology.

The menagerie of the latest open source frameworks cross many languages, databases, libraries and underlying computing models. Networking, object

managing frameworks like Zope, Twisted and Django slither along in the undergrowth, [2] and are occupying their space in the “web 2.0” universe. [3]Video sharing communities like EngageMedia are themselves based on such community built systems. [4] Collaborative CMS apps like Drupal, MediaWiki and WordPress, irradiate out from other active developer communities, generating weblogs, wikis, collaborative news, and group editable encyclopedias. [5] Twisting up the strands of open protocols and networked commodity hardware you can create communications structures such as real-time group text, chat and instant messaging – i.e., IRC networks, VOIP (voice over IP), email lists; and then link them all back together. [6] These systems help loop different communities back into the information commons, recursively amplifying feedback between participants and projects. [7]

Underneath the networked application stack – the browser and HTTP - lie stranger beasts. Audio-video codecs – coding and decoding algorithms – are fundamental to digital media. Some of these containers and codecs have corporate masters and some such as Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, Xvid are patent-free. Players, transcoders, uploaders, downloaders, license tools and search tools let you explore the world of unencumbered re-mixable media. [8]

The coders behind these applications, libraries and other software artifacts are motivated by a spectrum of reasons; scratching itches, egoboo, earning cash, art theory or any combination. Most noticeably they are organised around different distributions of the packaging of free software operating systems and applications, such as Debian, Ubuntu or Gentoo. [9] Universities have been involved since the beginning and now corporate interests have invaded. Economically free services are everywhere, like the ubiquitous Google - but the business model cocoon of a commercial spectacle wrapped around the mass of user contributed content is a fragile compromise between unequal partners. The payoffs from mimicry and subversion of “vectoralist” interests are still large. [10]