[Ecommerce] Washington Post: Creative Commons Is Rewriting Rules of Copyright

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

*Creative Commons Is Rewriting Rules of Copyright*

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page E01

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- When Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia released
their latest single, "No Meaning No," several months ago, they didn't
try to stop people from circulating free copies on the Internet. They
encouraged it.

They posted the entire 3-minute, 12-second song and its various vocal,
drum and guitar components online and invited everyone to view, copy,
mix, remix, sample, imitate, parody and even criticize it.

The result has been the creation of a flood of derivative work ranging
from classical twists on the hip-hop piece to video interpretations of
the song. The musicians reveled in the instant fan base. They were so
pleased that they recently decided to publish their next entire album,
due later this spring, the same way, becoming the first major artists to
do so.

"No Meaning No" was released under an innovative new licensing scheme
called Creative Commons that some say may be better suited to the
electronic age than the hands-off mind-set that has made copyright such
a bad word among the digerati.

So far, more than 10 million other creations -- ranging from the movie
"Outfoxed" and songs by the Beastie Boys to the British Broadcasting
Corp.'s news footage and the tech support books published under the
O'Reilly label -- have been distributed using these licenses. The idea
has even won the support of Hilary Rosen, formerly of the Recording
Industry Association of America, and Jack Valenti, the past head of the
Motion Picture Association of America, who became known for their
aggressive pursuit of people who share free, unauthorized copies via the
Internet.

Interest in Creative Commons licenses comes as artists, authors and
traditional media companies begin to warm to the idea of the Internet as
friend instead of foe and race to capitalize on technologies such as
file-sharing and digital copying.

Apple Computer Inc. gave many reason to be optimistic. Music lovers who
once spent hours scouring the Internet for free, pirated copies of songs
are now showing they are willing to pay for online music; the company
says it is selling 1.25 million songs, at 99 cents a track, each day.

Rare is the consumer electronics company or music label that is not
experimenting with something similar. Sony BMG, Universal Music Group,
EMI and Warner Music Group, for instance, inked deals to distribute
songs on a fee-based download service run by Wurld Media, a Saratoga
Springs, N.Y., peer-to-peer software company.

At the same time, many of the innovators who touched off the
file-sharing revolution are seeking to win corporate support for their
work. Shawn Fanning, who as a teen developed Napster, is now working on
software that would let copyright holders specify permissions and prices
for swapping. Vivendi Universal is a backer.

Perhaps the most significant cooperative effort, however, is the set of
innovative new licensing schemes under which "No Meaning No" was released.

The licenses are the brainchild of online theorist Lawrence Lessig, a
Stanford University law professor.

Lessig argues that the current system of copyright laws provides little
flexibility -- either you give up all permissions for use of your work
or you withhold everything. He proposed a solution: a set of copyright
licenses that would allow artists to choose to keep "some rights
reserved" rather than "all rights reserved."

They could, for instance, choose to allow their works to be enjoyed and
copied by others for any purpose, restrict such activity to
non-commercial use or allow use of portions of the work rather than all
of it. To that end, Lessig co-founded the nonprofit Creative Commons,
whose aim, as he describes it, is to "help artists and authors give
others the freedom to build upon their creativity -- without calling a
lawyer first."

What began as an offbeat legal experiment is now prompting people to
reconsider the notion of copyright.

"What we're doing is not only good for society but it's good for us and
our business because we get our music out," said Brian Hardgroove, 40,
the co-founder of Fine Arts Militia and the band's bass player.

The way Lessig sees it, art has always been about stealing, recycling
and mixing: Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were said to borrow from
each other's brushwork. The 1990s hit "Clueless" with Alicia Silverstone
was a modern-day adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma."

Technology has given the world an unprecedented ability to digitize
works, copy them, take them apart and put them back together again. But
Lessig said he worries that the extension of copyright laws is keeping
many works out of the public domain, hampering creativity. When the
Constitution was written, copyrights covered 14 years, extendable to 28
years. Now, with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act of 1998, these rights last until an author's death plus 70 years.

Lessig's goal with Creative Commons was to create a body of digital
work, which he calls "artifacts of culture," for the public domain,
accessible to all.

In the year since the licenses were unveiled, a steady stream of works
beyond popular music and videos has joined the Creative Commons public
domain archive: material for more than 500 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology classes, audio of every U.S. Supreme Court argument since
1950 from the Public Library of Science, the archives for Flickr's
photo-sharing site, and Cory Doctorow's futuristic novel "Down and Out
in the Magic Kingdom."

The book's first hardcover run was a sellout -- 10,000 copies in all --
in bookstores, but the number of free electronic copies distributed was
much greater. Half a million copies of the science fiction novel were
downloaded.

"There is this weird sense that the Internet is broken because it lets
people make easy copies. . . . The Internet is a machine for making
copies, and artists need to come to grips with that," Doctorow said.

Doctorow's experiment with his first novel went so well that he released
his second one, "Eastern Standard Tribe," under a Creative Commons
license and hopes to publish a third this spring the same way.

"At every turn in history we see this new model of distribution that
people say is going to destroy art itself," Doctorow said. But, he said,
such fears been proved wrong time and time again.

Fritz Attaway, Washington general counsel for the Motion Picture
Association of America, said work licensed under Creative Commons
licenses and those released under traditional copyright restrictions can
coexist.

"I think it's helpful to educate consumers that there is a place like
Creative Commons where one can access intellectual property that has
been freely made available to the general public without compensation
and that that should be distinguished from sites that are permitting
access to infringing material," he said.

Still, even the most optimistic say that Creative Commons will be only
part of the solution to ending the long-running battle over copyright.
Attaway said he doubts the major movie studios or record labels would
ever license large quantities of their work for distribution using
Creative Commons licenses because they make plenty of money off the
current system.

Hollywood producers Robert Greenwald and Jim Gilliam are among those
challenging such assumptions. They released their movie "Outfoxed" under
a Creative Commons license. Their controversial documentary accused Fox
News of being a propaganda machine for the Republican Party. Just weeks
after it was released in theaters, the producers posted 48 minutes of
original interviews from the work online.

Gilliam credits the Internet with boosting interest in the movie because
it reached a wider audience than it could in theaters alone. He said
many of those who viewed parts of the work online ended up ordering a
$9.95 DVD.

"This isn't necessarily just some altruistic thing," Gilliam said. "You
can make money off of this, too."

It is not always easy for consumers to know when a work is protected by
a Creative Commons license. If the work does not identify itself as
such, online users can go to CreativeCommons.org and search its
archives. In a few months, the developers behind the new Mozilla Firefox
browser plan to release an update designed to allow people to search the
Web for works of art licensed by Creative Commons.

John Buckman, an entrepreneur from Berkeley, Calif., has used the
Creative Commons licenses as the foundation for his new online record
label. All artists who sign with his company, Magnatune, must agree to
allow free use of their work for non-commercial purposes. The site
features 326 albums by 174 artists in six different genres, including
classical and heavy metal. He said the company makes 50 percent of its
money from downloads and 50 percent from licensing fees.

He said his label's songs are attractive because cash-strapped
filmmakers can use the songs as they like for free and have to pay only
when they start making money. "As much as musicians are having a hard
time making a living, filmmakers and other creative people are having a
hard time finding music to use in their works," he said.

And the start-up is making money, he said -- possibly as much as $2
million this year.

=A9 2005 The Washington Post Company