Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

["Danyl Strype" <strypey AT riseup.net>]

Kia ora koutou ko Leigh

Good to see I'm not the only person in the CC world with  
anti-copyright leanings ;) The only problem with anti-copyright is  
what happens if a corporation publishes my work, thus copyrighting it,  
and makes stacks of money out of it without crediting either my  
reputation or my bank balance? Placing a work in the public domain  
might deal with the attribution issue (or it might not, can anyone  
confirm that?), but if there is money being made out of something I've  
created, am I not entitled to a share, at least for a limited time?

Personally I see CC as being less about enforcement, and more of an  
attempt to create a social dialogue about the balance between our  
rights as creators and recipients of cultural objects. In practice,  
like copyright licenses before the age of the internet, they're only  
really worth legally enforcing if there are large volumes of money at  
stake, or perhaps if fake all-rights-reserved claims are being made  
over something that's in the commons.

That's why I really like the way the licenses have 3 forms:
- human readable form, essentially a polite request from artist to audience
- machine readable form, linking the work into the online commons  
infostructure
- lawyer readable form, the polite request rewritten in the language  
of local copyright law

Basically I see the legalese aspects of the licenses as a plug-in to  
the CC conceptual structure, just the same way you can install an  
Adobe .pdf reader plug-in to Mozilla Firefox. If you don't want to  
read .pfs with Adobe's software, you can use Firefox without the Adobe  
plugin. If you don't want to use the legal system, you can still make  
use of the polite request and tagging aspects of CC licensing. It's a  
way of saying, 'Sure, share my work with people you think will like it."

What attracts an anarchist like me to CC is the idea of hacking the  
legal system to protect the little guy from corporate exploitation. I  
think there is scope for using a similar strategy to protect  
indigenous knowledge from corporate exploitation, without necessarily  
privatizing it into "intellectual property", and I'm really pleased to  
see there's conference exploring these issues (thanks Jane for the  
info on those two conferences).

RnB
Strypey

Quoting "Leigh Blackall" <leighblackall AT gmail.com>:

> Hi Jessica, thanks - I didn't know about CC US(A)
>
> Good to here there is some talk about it going on... it seemed to catch
> people I spoke to at OER Vancouver by surprise.
> Just in case this topic is causing others on the list to roll their eyes, I
> posted some thoughts about the inadvertent cultural colonisation of
> OER<http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/08/looking-into-sky-open-ed-oh-nine.html>last
> year. In that post is a link to a probably better known critique of
> Creative Commons by Marco Fiorette in his article Tragedy of the
> Commons<http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B_d9mhjA-uLJZTE1YTBjYWEtYTNiNS00MGNiLWI4YjctNzIxYTEzYmZmMTVk&hl=en>




--
"A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."
- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and
those who matter don't mind."
- Dr Suess

http://strypey.orconhosting.net.nz/contacts.html