Is It Rude To Link To Someone Without First Asking Permission?

from the not-that-I've-ever-heard dept

Earlier this week, I wrote an analysis of some silly claims from Canadian IP lawyer James Gannon's sarcastic suggestion that copying money is just like copying content. Gannon stopped by in our comments... and oddly did not respond to a single point that I raised about his faulty analysis. Instead, he only commented to claim that it was somehow rude or discourteous of me to link to his piece and to discuss it without first asking for permission. I found this somewhat shocking. I've never heard that it's common courtesy to ask before you link to someone. Yet Gannon insisted that most people who link to him first ask his permission and he suggests, snidely, that his readership has higher "standards" in regards to how they view content.

Of course, when you combine this with Nina Paley's excellent post about how asking permission when none is needed is rude, it seems that we have a pretty serious disagreement here. Not surprisingly, I agree wholeheartedly with Nina and find Gannon's position both troubling and enlightening when it comes to his confused interpretation of intellectual property issues. He seems to think that a permission society is just fine. Those of us who actually create for a living know that this is not the case. It's a distraction and an annoyance when people feel the need to keep asking you for permission to do what they naturally have the right to do. Permission society is one that is less creative and less willing and able to create. Permission society is the exact opposite of what copyright law is supposed to create. It's not supposed to be a drag on creation. The whole point of things like fair use is that you don't have to ask for permission because it's inefficient to ask for permission in those cases. That he's suggesting that it's somehow discourteous not to ask for permission to do what the law clearly allows is really quite troubling.

In the meantime, has anyone actually ever heard that it's common courtesy to ask someone permission to link to them? I spend a lot of time online and I link to a lot of websites (over 38,000 posts last we checked...) and no one has ever suggested that I should have asked permission first.

Filed Under: james gannon, links, nina paley, permission

Interview With Nina Paley: The More You Share, The More Valuable Your Works Become

from the economics-of-abundance dept

Regular Techdirt contributor Nina Paley has a fascinating interview (pdf) in the latest edition of Radical History Review. The issue is all about "new approaches to enclosures," so a discussion on enclosures around content and ideas seems absolutely appropriate. The actual interview took place a while ago, so it's a bit out of date, but is still a worthwhile read. It has a nice summary of the process she had to go through to clear the music for her film Sita Sings the Blues, which debunks the commonly cited fallacy that her position on copyright is because she failed to clear the music for her film. This is entirely false. In fact, she reached out to the copyright holders first, and even admits they might never have even realized that her film existed (or that they held the copyrights on the compositions of these ancient songs) if she hadn't told them.

People advise me, "Why don't you just ask the companies for permission?" But the cost of asking for permission is extremely high. All of the artists are dead, so I can't ask their permission. And all of the works belong to these corporations, and the corporations won't talk to normal people. If they don't know who you are, they don't return your calls or they just give you the runaround. They will only talk to lawyers and music supervisors, people who are paid intermediaries.

We tried for months to contact the copyright holders directly, and they wouldn't give us any information or respond to us, so I had to hire a lawyer to talk to them. Before I even got an estimate of what it would cost to license this music, I had to pay $15,000 to an intermediary. When I specified that the entire budget for the film was less than $200,000, they came back with the bargain-basement amount of $220,000 to use Hanshaw's music in my film. And before they would even talk to me about anything, I had to pay them $500 per song and sign a piece of paper promising not to make any money from it at film festivals, and that after one year, I wouldn't even be able to show it anymore.

Paley does a nice job explaining why the idea of the "tragedy of the commons" really doesn't apply to ideas and content, even if it's one of the regular justifications for copyright, and how the more her work gets shared, the more valuable it becomes:

Calling both a grassy field and ideas a "commons" is interesting, because one of them, the grassy field, is tangible and scarce, whereas the other one is not actually limited. A lot of the conversation that happens around imaginary property is that people think that it’s real. The "enclosure of the commons" metaphor definitely works for both, but a grassy field is very different from culture in that there's only so much grassy field. A grassy field is actually real; if, for example, you take a bulldozer to your grassy field, then the grassy field is ruined. But if you take your bulldozer to a copy of your work, then there are all these other copies. It doesn't affect the idea. It only affects one copy. So the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" doesn't really apply to intellectual/cultural works at all.

Real things are limited. If you don't take care of the field, or if you overgraze it, then there's not enough grass for the other sheep. With cultural works, it's the exact opposite. The more they're shared, the more valuable they become. People apply these ideas about scarcity to culture, and culture is not scarce. People are thinking of the "problem of abundance": the idea that people don't know what to do with abundance. But there is no tragedy of the cultural commons. I've read justifications of copyright where people say that if culture is shared too much the value of the work is diluted. Who came up with that idea? The opposite is true: works do not become less valuable the more they're shared; they become more valuable the more they're shared. What on earth are they talking about when they say that sharing dilutes the value of the work?

Another key point made in the article is debunking the whole "but, but plagiarism!" response to copyright discussions, whereby people confuse copyright and plagiarism. She first covers how the two are different, and then notes that someone copying her work without crediting her isn't as big a problem as many people think it is, because (1) it doesn't actually harm her actual work and (2) the more widely her work is actually shared, the more people will realize that the plagiarist plagiarized:

I do want my work to be credited to me, but I don't think it's important or necessary to have that legal component of it, because I really believe that a community enforces that much better than the law does. No one would be sued for plagiarizing Shakespeare. If I publish "Hamlet by Nina Paley," no one is going to sue me. The freer my work is, the less plagiarized it will be, because the more people know what it is. I think what's really cool about free culture is that it actually protects work much better from plagiarism.

Anyway, those are just a few snippets. The full interview covers a lot more ground and is well worth reading for those interested in these topics.

Filed Under: copyright, nina paley, sharing

Copyheart: Encouraging People To Copy

from the copying-is-an-act-of-love dept

Occasional Techdirt contributor Nina Paley, who has pointed out some problems with Creative Commons in the past, is pushing an interesting solution: the Copyheart. It's not a huge license or anything like Creative Commons, but just a basic suggestion: where you might normally put a © symbol, instead put a ♥ -- and perhaps an explanation. As she notes:

Instead of

© Copyright 2010 by Author/Artist. All Rights Reserved.

you could write

♥ 2010 by Author/Artist. Copying is an act of love. Please copy.

Who knows if it catches on, but it's a cool idea. Though... my only complaint is that she's using a non-HTML standard heart character -- so I've created a derivative version. While she uses a heart character, in this post I'm just using the HTML version, which is typed out as "♥" and will thus be more compatible with HTML documents and various browsers.

Filed Under: copyheart, copyright, nina paley

Creative Commons' Branding Confusion

from the NC-stands-for-Not-Copyleft dept

About a year and a half ago I released my film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. That license allows truly free distribution, including commercial use, as long as the free license remains in place. But my experience is that most people see the words "Creative Commons" and simply assume the license is Non-Commercial -- because the majority of Creative Commons licenses they've seen elsewhere have been Non-Commercial.

This is a real problem. Some artists have re-released Sita remixes under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses. Many bloggers and journalists assume the non-commercial restrictions, even when the license is correctly named:

The film was made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License, allowing third parties to share the creative content for non-commercial purposes freely as long as the author of the content is attributed as the creator of the work. --Frontline, India's National Magazine

Initially I tried to explain what "ShareAlike" means, and asked "Sita" remixers to please switch to ShareAlike, per the terms of the ShareAlike license under which I released it. I felt like an ass; I don't want to be a licensing cop. After a while, mis-identifications of the project's license became so widespread I gave up trying to correct them. "Creative Commons" means "Non-Commercial" to most people. Fighting it is a sisyphean task.

So I'm stuck with a branding problem. As long as I use any Creative Commons license, most people will think it prohibits commercial use. Hardly anyone seems to register, let alone understand, CC-SA. Worse, those who do notice the ShareAlike marker combine it with Non-Commercial restrictions on their re-releases, which compounds the confusion (CC-NC-SA is the worst license I can imagine).

ShareAlike is an imperfect solution to copyright restrictions, as it imposes one restriction of its own: a restriction against imposing any further restrictions. It's an attempt to use copyright against itself. As long as we live in a world wherein everything is copyrighted by default, I will use ShareAlike or some other Copyleft equivalent to attempt to maintain a "copyright-free zone" around my works. In a better world, there would be no automatic copyright and thus no need for me to use any license at all. Should that Utopia come about, I will remove all licenses from all my work. Meanwhile I attempt to limit other peoples' freedom to limit other peoples' freedom.

It would be nice if the Creative Commons organization did something to address this branding confusion. We suggested re-branding ShareAlike licenses as CC-PRO, but given that Creative Commons' largest constituency is users of Non-Commercial licenses, it seems unlikely (but not impossible!) that they would distinguish their true Copyleft license with a "pro" brand.

It would also be nice if everyone, including and especially representatives of Creative Commons, referred to their licenses by their names, instead of just "Creative Commons." "Thank you for using a Creative Commons license," they tell me. You're welcome; I would thank you for calling it a ShareAlike license. Almost every journalist refers to all 7 licenses as simply "Creative Commons licenses." And so in the popular imagination, my ShareAlike license is no different from a Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives license.

This branding crisis came to a head recently when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation banned all Creative Commons licensed music in its shows:

The issue with our use of Creative Commons music is that a lot of our content is readily available on a multitude of platforms, some of which are deemed to be 'commercial' in nature (e.g. streaming with pre-roll ads, or pay for download on iTunes) and currently the vast majority of the music available under a Creative Commons license prohibits commercial use.

In order to ensure that we continue to be in line with current Canadian copyright laws, and given the lack of a wide range of music that has a Creative Commons license allowing for commercial use, we made a decision to use music from our production library in our podcasts as this music has the proper usage rights attached. link

The Creative Commons organization wants to get the CBC to separate out its different licenses. They could help by calling their licenses by their different names. If the Creative Commons organization itself calls them all "Creative Commons Licenses," how can they expect others to distinguish the licenses from each other?

 

Perhaps Creative Commons should only offer the Non-Commercial/No Derivatives licenses everyone associates with the name. Then they could create a new name/brand for their Free licenses. FreeCommons? CultureSource? CopyLove?

Meanwhile, I'm wondering how to clearly communicate my work is COPYLEFT. In addition to the CC-SA license, if there's room I write "COPYLEFT, ALL WRONGS REVERSED". Unfortunately, the term "Copyleft" is growing increasingly meaningless as well. For example, Brett Gaylor's mostly excellent film RIP: A Remix Manifesto gets a lot of things right, but it misunderstands and misuses the term "copyleft". Copyleft actually means this:

the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work. In other words, copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. -Wikipedia

But in RIP it means this:

See that dollar sign with the slash in it? That means Non-Commercial restrictions, which are most definitely NOT Copyleft.

Anyone introduced to the word "Copyleft" in that film will have no idea what Copyleft actually means in terms of licenses.

I need a license that people understand. I'm tempted by the WTFPL but I would have to fork it to add a copyleft provision. The Do Whatever You Want And Don't Restrict Others From Doing Whatever They Want Public License? WTFDROPL?

Are there any other useable Copyleft licenses out there that aren't associated with non-commercial restrictions? I'm open to suggestions.

Filed Under: branding, confusion, creative commons, nina paley, non-commercial

Some Hows and Whys of Free Culture

from the I'm-talking!-again! dept

On July 16th I gave at talk at H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth) called "Sita Sings the Blues: a Free Culture Success Story." 9 Minutes of excerpts are below, in which I discuss why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, how software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more.

For those with longer attention spans, you can watch the entire unedited hour-long talk. It includes even more topics like Minute Memes, cultural lineages, combining vs. originating, many Ramayanas, our impoverished Public Domain, understanding Free Culture, Content vs. Containers, and a more detailed income breakdown of the Sita Free Distribution Project.

Filed Under: free culture, nina paley

Are Non-Commercial Creative Commons Licenses A Bad Idea? Nina Paley & Cory Doctorow Debate...

from the clash-of-the-titans dept

Venerable author Cory Doctorow and I engaged in a friendly email debate this Summer, with the intention of sharing it to illuminate some issues confronting Free Culture and Creative Commons licenses. It's quite long, but hits on many topics of interest to Techdirt readers.

Read Paley & Doctorow argue over Non-Commercial licenses

Cory releases his books under -NC ("Non-Commercial") licenses. The -NC restriction is Creative Commons' most popular, but has a lot of problems, including incompatibility with Free licenses. As an alternative, I recommend the Creator Endorsed Mark used with a copyleft (such as Share-Alike) license. The sparks fly from there! (Actually it's all very civil, but if I say sparks fly maybe more people will read it.)

I'm curious to read how the Techdirt community weighs on on these issues, so please comment.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, creative commons, nina paley, noncommercial
Companies: creative commons

Comically Absurd IP

from the Blatant-Self-Promotion dept

Certain arguments come up over and over again in copyright debates. Mike recently wrote about copyright monopolists calling Free Culture "neo Marxist." This is so absurd, yet so common, that there's a comic about it:

In fact there is a whole IP* category over at Mimi & Eunice. How many times have we heard an indignant "thou shalt not steal"?

How often do we hear competition denounced as theft?

There are strips about business models...

Price vs. Value...

Patents...

and of course, Lawyers:

Naturally, these comics are Free, copyLeft, share-able, copy-able, and embeddable. It is my fondest wish that writers will use these images in their articles and comments, without asking permission. What's in it for me, you ask? The more people see Mimi & Eunice, the more cultural value they'll have. Watching works find their audience is a singular pleasure for an artist. But since Techdirt is more about business models, I'll add that the more people share the strips online, the more value a paper book will have, which I can then sell.

*"IP" stands for something slightly different over there.

Filed Under: comics, intellectual property, nina paley

The EULA Menace

from the watch-out dept

As part of the EFF's 20th anniversary, it's hosting a screening of Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, a movie we've spoken about quite a few times, due to both the copyright questions around it, and Nina's subsequent business model choices. As part of her appearance, Nina also created the latest of her "minute meme" animations for the EFF, this one about EULA's, and how they make you sign away more than you realize. We figured many of you might enjoy the short video:

Filed Under: eulas, nina paley

The Myth Of Originality...

from the it's-not-what-you-think dept

Nina Paley alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality, and why it's so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are "original" usually aren't very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another -- a point that we've made here many times. And yet, many people seem to think that there's some sort of objective standard for originality, and that something that involves a direct copy of something else as part of the process can't count as original (though, they conveniently ignore it when "the greats" like Mozart or Shakespeare did a direct cut-and-paste type of copying in their own works).

Paley then goes on to make a second point: which is that the traditional gatekeepers of culture, for all their talk of the importance of originality (whenever they talk down any kind of copying) are actually more likely to stomp on anything truly original, because there is no "proven market" for it. A movie has to fit a certain formula. A hit pop song must meet a series of pre-programmed conditions. No originality allowed.

So where is originality really? It's not an intrinsic value in the work, but in the perception of how people view a work. I find things like Kutiman's music tremendously original and unique, but in the comments here, critics have decried his efforts as "cut and paste copying" of little value. So different people have different takes on originality. Why should we set in place laws that enforce some sort of official standard on what is, and what is not, original, when it's our own perception that really determines what is original?

Separately, Paley recently also put together this neat short film that does a nice job of demonstrating that all artwork is derivative:

Filed Under: creativity, derivative works, gatekeepers, nina paley, originality