[cc-community] CC-like video release form

Gavin Baker gavin at gavinbaker.com
Wed Jan 16 14:22:41 EST 2008


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Terry's whole argument for open licensing of personality rights seems to
be, "Well, it's no worse than waiving them to a company." Maybe, but
that doesn't make me any more comfortable.

If I waive my rights to CNN, there might not be "any true personal
accountability," but I feel pretty secure I'm not going to end up in a
neo-Nazi propaganda piece (at least, not with CNN's permission; you can
never get away from fair use, or whatever the corollary is with
personality rights). But with open licensing, there's NO accountability
whatever, in fact there's an open invitation to all kinds of crazies to
put words in my mouth (hey, derivatives are allowed!) and make it seem
like I'm saying them.

I am not saying it can't be done, but we need a more convincing line of
rhetoric than Terry's or a new mechanism which, like CC, protects "some
rights" while permitting legitimate uses (i.e. using my likeness only in
proper context). Given the subjective nature of "proper", open licensing
may not be desirable or even possible in this context. I suspect that,
given more legal clarity on the subject, we may find this discussion
easier to wrap our minds out, rather than assuming any use of someone's
image for any purpose whatever needs a waiver and thus searching wildly
for ways to ensure the user always receives a waiver.

Terry Hancock wrote:
| Fred Benenson wrote:
|> Do you think there is going to be a demand for a license that has media
|> subjects willfully abandoning their commercial image rights and
privacy for
|> the sake of freedom?
|
| Sure. Most of the time when releases are signed by people other than
| actors and performers (who view their publicity rights as a saleable
| asset), they give up pretty much all control to a single "entity", which
| more often than not is a company, not a person. Thus, there isn't really
| any true personal accountability and the contracts are usually
| boilerplate which pretty much removes all legal recourse for the
| subject. And even if such recourse existed, most people wouldn't use it,
| so signing it away doesn't seem like a big sacrifice.
|
| Free licensing contracts are always different from proprietary licensing
| contracts in that they emphasize the *terms* rather than the *entities*
| involved in the agreement. Thus, for example, the By-SA ensures that
| modification of the work will stay under the same terms rather than with
| the same author.
|
| What I describe creates the same situation for releases: the subject
| has assurance not of *who* will use their image, but rather *on what
| terms* the image will be used. If it's under a CC license, then that
| by itself will be some degree of assurance to many people.
|
| But, just as you can't *really* trust the multi-national conglomerate
| you signed a deal with, you can't *really* trust that using a CC license
| promotes good intentions or behavior.
|
| Nevertheless, just as some photographers would like to see their By-SA
| images used only by By-SA publishers, which they perceive as a public
| benefit, some subjects will feel the same way.
|
| And some won't.
|
| But, for myself, I would feel much more comfortable with a pool of photo
| subjects who have made this agreement than to just take my chances that
| I won't get sued because somebody who happens to be in a CC-licensed
| image that I used disagrees with my politics. Even if that means the
| pool of material is smaller.
|
| And as I say, I would sign off on this kind of deal, assuming that I
| approved of the initial project in the first place. In fact, I think
| most people would implicitly assume that they will have to agree to
| something like this if they agree to appear in a By-SA work (at least,
| if they know what By-SA means).
|
| Please remember that such a release wouldn't sign away *all* image
| rights, only the use of the images appearing in a particular work.
|
| Also, there are probably some rights that could still be retained. For
| example, you can use images of NASA astronauts in NASA images which are
| "copyright free", but there is still a restriction against using them
| to imply endorsement of a product. Such endorsement restrictions (which
| would be fraudulent anyway), seem to be perfectly reasonable to me, and
| don't conflict with By-SA, IMHO.
|
|> I admire your les-affaires approach to your own image, but I really
wonder
|
| BTW, that's "laissez-faire", French for "let be", not "les affaires",
| French for "the affairs", though I can see they do sound a lot alike. :-D
|
| Cheers,
| Terry
|

- --
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com

He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found
happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.
~    epitaph of George Washington Carver
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