[A2k] a guide to open content licenses

[Manon Ress]

Check out this guide, there are good principles that we might want to
use for a paris Accord?

A Guide To Open Content Licences
Lawrence Liang

SNIP
How can we share culture in a world where everything has a license?

Scientists, writers, designers, artists, musicians and others are
increasingly interested in making their work available in 'the public
domain'. This booklet is an overview of the ways in which this has
been done and a guide to the growing area of Open Content Licenses
through which people design and safeguard access to their work.

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/lliang/open_content_guide

Introduction

In recent years copyright has moved away from being an esoteric and
technical legal subject to one that affects musicians, designers,
artists, students, authors, ordinary consumers, and more generally
any one involved in any way in cultural production. Copyright stories
assault us everyday in our newspapers, our emails and in the next few
years, will play a very important role in determining the way we
think of creativity; either in terms of property or in terms of
collaboration. It is an issue in which content creators have a vital
stake and certainly too important an issue to leave to the lawyers
alone.

This booklet serves as an introduction to the world of "open content
licensing", a paradigm that is rapidly emerging as an important
alternative to the existing model of copyright.

The world of open content licensing (which we shall consider in
detail as we go along) has great benefits for a large number of
people. You could for instance be:

The creator of a website who wants it to be available indefinitely as
a free, public resource.

You would like to allow anyone to mirror your site or use its content
for other projects without needing to obtain permission. After the
creator's death mirroring or continuing the site should not be
illegal for 70 years just because of standard copyright regulations.
A musician or part of a band that wants to make your music available
to a larger audience, and you decide that making it available online
would be a good idea. But yet you may want to ensure that no one
makes any commercial use of your music without your permission.
A part-time photographer or designer who has no problem with any
person using your work or sharing it with others as long as they
acknowledge your authorship and give you proper credit for it
whenever they use your work.
A documentary or experimental filmmaker willing to share your footage
with others, and allowing them to use portions while making their films.
Someone looking at using existing images, music, videos etc and
mixing them with other content to create a remix or a new version,
but who cannot afford to pay the high royalty or be someone
interested in having people from other backgrounds use your work, or
incorporate it into theirs.
An artist whose work fundamentally depends on the ability to use
existing material to create parodies, spoofs or subversions.
A designer looking at collaborating with either another designer or
just someone from a completely different discipline, by using or
incorporating their work.
A teacher interested in making your course syllabus available for
others to use, so that they comment, add, critique it, or even work
collaboratively with you to create an improvement on the course.
A scholar, critic or essayist who wants his writing to be publicly
accessible, to schools, libraries and the general public instead of
signing over copyrights to academic journal and book publishers who
normally do not pay their authors, but make public institutions pay a
lot of money for these publications.
A playwright interested in writing an experimental play through an
online collaboration model and interested in ensuring that the play
is available for everyone to use, but also concerned that any person
who creates a version of your play should also allow others the same
freedom of modifying or adapting this play that they have written.
Or just someone in the world of cultural production who is sick of
the dominant system of copyright and wants to explore other options.
But hey, what is wrong with the world of copyright anyway, and why
should we even begin to start thinking in terms of alternatives to
it? After all isn't copyright a system that exists primarily to
protect creators and provide them with an incentive to produce?

While an initial purpose of copyright may have been to provide an
incentive for creators, it is important not to be taken in completely
by this mythical claim made by copyright. Consider for instance the
following:

Most creators/ authors are rarely the owners of their own copyright.
It usually gets transferred to either the recording company, the
publisher, or the person commissioning a work of art etc. Even in
countries where copyright may, by law, be non-transferable, most
publishers effectively circumvent this regulation by requiring the
author to sign a contract which grants the publisher exclusive
distribution rights.
Musicians often make most of their money from live performances
rather than from royalties from sales of their records. They sell
"services", as do many programmers and designers.
And of course, monetary incentive is rarely the only reason for a
person to be in cultural production. Besides, an open content model
does not preclude you from making money off your work.
Copyright began as a system of balances to provide incentives to
creators while also ensuring that there was a free circulation of
works in the public domain, which all other creators could build
upon. For example, copyright explicitly allowed (and still allows)
public libraries to exist as an alternative, non-commercial
distribution channel for cultural works. Over time, this balance has
shifted drastically in favour of content owners such as large
publishing houses, media conglomerates etc. In fact copyright is
often used as a tool to prevent or curb creativity and the move away
from copyright is an important one in that it seeks to refocus on the
interest of the general public as well as artists and creators.


************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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