Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Danyl Strype <strypey AT disintermedia.net.nz>]

Kia ora koutou

Last night I went along to a well-attend public meeting in Ōtepoti on
the importance of public service broadcasting, one of a series
organized by the 'Save TVNZ7' campaign around the country. During
question time, I asked the panel why the producers of publicly-funded
TV programs were allowed to impose All-Rights-Reserved (ARR)
copyright, effectively making the public pay for them twice. Most of
the responses fell into the usual fallacy that CC and artists making a
living are mutually exclusive (can someone *please* send Clare Curran
a copy of 'The Power of Open'?). However, I got a round of applause
from the crowd for mentioning CC, and there's definitely some cautious
support for CC-licensing of TV content in some contexts, like the
publicly-owned content sitting in archives unwatched after one
broadcast sometime before dawn.

I didn't get a right of reply, but if I had, my argument would have
gone like this. If a channel like TVNZ7 - entirely funded by
publicly-owned TVNZ - is paying salaries and expenses for the
production of TV program, the public have a right to watch it, and to
share it with each other, in any format they see fit. That means at
minimum a CC BY-NC-ND license.

However, if cultural production is being subsidized by the taxpayer,
it must be very important that people see it. If that's the case, why
stop commercial use? The CC license opens up a multiple of ways for
people to access a free-of-charge version (from digital tv and
OnDemand to BitTorrent and hitchhikers with hard drives). Any member
of the public watching a publicly-funded program through a commercial
channel helped pay for it's production, why can't they choose how to
watch it? So, really a CC-BY-ND might as well be the minimum.

I'd go further. If the public are paying the full cost of that media
being produced, don't they also have a right to use it in remixes and
mash-ups? One complication here is that the program-makers sometimes
license stock footage, clips, graphics, photos, music, or other
audio-visual elements that are ARR copyright. However, working under
the CC-BY-SA allows program-makers to draw from a growing pool of
CC-licensed content from around the world, and it doesn't stop them
using material from the Public Domain (although of course the license
terms don't apply to this material). Surely not having public
production dollars siphoned off by ARR copyright holders can only help
keep it affordable and effective?

So really, why not go all the way with CC-BY-SA, and make it a
condition of receiving public funding for cultural production, whether
its TV programs, films, music etc? If this license was applied
retrospectively to all media that had the full cost of production
covered by public funds, a lot of ARR copyright media produced in this
country would no longer be ARR, and a lot of the licensing issues for
program elements would evaporate like the morning dew.

I can imagine there will be some artists who will be unhappy if they
can't have the public pay for their production costs, then attempt to
use ARR copyright to monetize their work (I say attempt because
usually public funding is sought precisely because the commercial
potential is... limited). Well, that's tough. If the public pays, the
public has a right of access. If they want to lock it up behind ARR
copyright paywalls, they can seek funding from the banks and media
corporations who provide venture capital. They can't have their cake
and eat it too.

The only other objection I can think of is the usual one, which
amounts to a more polite version of:
"Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine
ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit
there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not
caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you
whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony
Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes."

It's a fair cop, to blatantly steal another Monty Python line, but
society's to blame ;)

Hei kōnā
Strypey

-- 
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"freedom is participation in power.”
- Cicero

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

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allowing it to be corrupted."
- Richard Stallman
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/Stallman.xml