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cc-nz - Re: [Cc-nz] CC parochial

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Subject: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Hamish MacEwan <hamish.macewan AT gmail.com>
  • To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion <cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] CC parochial
  • Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 08:53:06 +1200

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 04:09, Danyl Strype <strypey AT riseup.net> wrote:

> 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?

As noted in a later posting further publication does not impose
copyright, and since margins and scarcity are so closely linked the
likelihood of them making lots of money (as opposed to saving a little
on licensing) doesn't seem a big risk. CC and the GPL are attempts,
IMHO (as is all this), to balance "rights" and need exist only as long
as the inverse protections do, copyleft vs copyright only as long as
the latter exists. Regrettably the waste of State subsidised
enforcement is required on both sides.

There also seems to be a dissonance here for those who are advocating
a rich and vibrant public domain and retaining the notion of property
and entitlement to reward. I'm all for paying the creator, but not
when they are dead, nor when they do nothing in the transformation of
the work.

As for the protection of the little guy, this has been the spin of
patent and copyright for ever (along with the innovation myth).
Supporters wheel out indigent wives and daughters and plead for
special privileges to assist them while it is the top hatted, mustache
twirling proprietors who rake in the dosh.

> 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

And there are. The NPV of "intellectual property" taken over a
life+fifty year term is pretty high, and there's always the chance of
that "sleeper" hit that jackpots. The large sums of course in no way
reflect the scarcity and/or value of the product, the monopoly
(limited, hah!) is applied ruthlessly to everything, and every earning
opportunity. Why should anyone involved in the production of
Terminator 2 be given money for this work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlS_Rnb5WM4?

> What attracts an anarchist like me to CC is the idea of hacking the
> legal system to protect the little guy from corporate exploitation.

Regrettably the legal system is a combination of levers, and your
strength to move them. Corporates generally have the upper hand in
the latter and aren't overwhelmed by the penalties as Telecom has
demonstrated over the last decade. Monopoly, even limited and widely
granted, remains asymmetric. Anyway, what's an anarchist doing
finding good in the legal system, <grin>.

> 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).

Any protection should apply to everyone, waving the bogey of
"corporate" exploitation in the direction of the indigenous
particularly seems, patronising. Though if such protection is applied
I look forward to my share of the licencing royalties for the platonic
solids my ancestors codified a millennia or so back.

("The Platonic solids have been known since antiquity. Ornamented
models of them can be found among the carved stone balls created by
the late neolithic people of Scotland at least 1000 years before Plato
(Atiyah and Sutcliffe 2003)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid)

> RnB
> Strypey


Hamish.
--
http://tr.im/HKM




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