Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Richard White <richard.white AT otago.ac.nz>]

Haha, sounds good Leigh.

 

Actually, I wonder if anyone has any experience of registering a patent or trademark and had any comments on the process.  How easy is it?  What does it cost?  Who decides whether what you’re claiming is actually your original thing?

 

(though maybe you wouldn’t have to have a registration process if the stipulation was simply that you assert your rights in some way, e.g. putting the © symbol or a CC licence on the work – and then you just have to prove the validity of your claim if there is an issue that comes up, i.e. you want to claim a breach of your rights so you have to show an archive of the original page or whatever.)

 

 

From: cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Leigh Blackall
Sent: Monday, 28 January 2013 10:14 a.m.
To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion
Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] Stallman on the orphan-multiplier effect of NC licenses

 

Well Richard, between you and I, we have a cross Tasman agreement :) Perhaps we both could prepare a submission to the Australian review, written in such a way to be useful in NZ as well, and indicating to the review that the problem of international agreement is at least under way between us two :)

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Richard White <richard.white AT otago.ac.nz> wrote:

Leigh said:

It seems to me that if we used todays technology to return to the practice of having to register copyright, like we do patents and remarks, then we'd be somewhere closer to a more manageable balance. Anything that is not registered is public domain.

Yes!  I’ve often had this thought myself, given that anyone who wants to protect their work should actively do so anyway (i.e. by actually thinking about their rights and what others can do with what they create).  I would suggest a slight variation to what Leigh says: you’d have to specifically assert all-rights-reserved and where this didn’t happen would not be public domain (where not even attribution is required) to a sort of moral-rights-reserved, where you’d still have to attribute the creator, not treat the work in a defamatory way, etc., as is currently expressed in the Act.  So, if I put a picture up on my blog with no rights assertion of any kind then those things still apply to the work.  So, in a way, this other type of right would be CC BY.

 

You wouldn’t think this would affect anyone who really makes money off their content because they already assert their rights.  It would just free up all that other stuff.  The down side for them would be the process of registering, which you’d make as simple as possible.  This would even give them the ability to assert breaches with more authority because they can say ‘see my assertion with X agency on 12-9-2009.’  You’d need some system/body for registration too.

I’ve never even really suggested this out loud because it seems the complete opposite of where things are going, as well as my own cynicism.  I’ve not checked but I presume such fundamental change would require international agreement/modification of the Berne convention terms, etc.

 

 

From: cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Leigh Blackall
Sent: Monday, 28 January 2013 9:18 a.m.

To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] Stallman on the orphan-multiplier effect of NC licenses

 

Danyl offered some suggestions.

I've been considering making a submission to the Australian review of copyright, linked to in this forum a couple of weeks ago.

It seems to me that if we used todays technology to return to the practice of having to register copyright, like we do patents and remarks, then we'd be somewhere closer to a more manageable balance. Anything that is not registered is public domain.

As it is now, with everything automatically assuming All Rights Reserved, sharing appears to be unnatural and bureaucratic.

On Jan 27, 2013 6:21 PM, "Sutherland, Paul" <Paul.Sutherland AT ccc.govt.nz> wrote:

Haven't read the Stallman article - imagine its very nice

But surely rather than getting Stalanistic/Calvinistic/Stallmanistic about NC why not imagine a solution to enable NC moving forward.

NC is not evil just like commerce is not evil.

I imagine many many people will want to continue to have an NC license.

And would like some tools to use to ensure tracking - unlike the problem of the orphan works from the past

The Gift always has to be paid for.

/paul



-----Original Message-----
From: cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:cc-nz-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Danyl Strype
Sent: Sunday, 27 January 2013 4:11 AM
To: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion
Subject: [Cc-nz] Stallman on the orphan-multiplier effect of NC licenses

Kia ora koutou

Just stumbled across an interesting claim by Richard Stallman about the use of CC licenses which include the NonCommercial clause (CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA).

>> The problem arises because, with the Internet, people can easily (and lawfully) pile one noncommercial modification on another. Over decades this will result in works with contributions from hundreds or even thousands of people.

What happens if you would like to use one of those works commercially?
How could you get permission? You'd have to ask all the substantial copyright holders. Some of them might have contributed years before and be impossible to find. Some might have contributed decades before, and might well be dead, but their copyrights won't have died with them. You'd have to find and ask their heirs, supposing it is possible to identify those. In general, it will be impossible to clear copyright on the works that these licenses invite people to make.

This is a form of the well-known "orphan works" problem, except exponentially worse; when combining works that had many contributors, the resulting work can be orphaned many times over before it is born.
<<
http://stallman.org/articles/online-education.html

If this is true, it's definitely an issue which needs addressing because of the popularity of the NC clause with many people who contribute to Open Educational Resources (OER). Either creators of OER need to stop using the NC clause (even though some are very attached to it), or this aspect of NC licensing needs fixing.

My first thought was that one way to fix this could be to give the creator of the original the right to give permission for commercial use of all downstream remixes, as well as the right to be acknowledged as the originator, which would be necessary for this to be useful.
Then it occurred to me to wonder if the creator of a remix of an NC work has any commercial rights to their remix in the first place?
Obviously they have no commercial rights to any part of the original.
But do they hold the commercial rights to any novel parts they have added (or any re-ordering of parts of the original), or does the effect of the NC clause propagate to derivative work, reserving commercial rights to them in the hands of the original creator anyway?
Is Stallman wrong that this is a problem? It would be good to get some clarification on this.

In the bigger picture, I think the best way to manage the copyright of large bodies of CC-licensed OER is the same way they are managed in large free code projects like LibreOffice and Mozilla, through Copyright Assignment Agreements which make a non-profit institution the steward (and where necessary, enforcer, or granter of extra
permissions) of the conditions of the license used. Since most teachers work for or with an educational institution anyway, one option is for those institutions to become the copyright steward of any OER projects their staff initiate. The status and reputation they gain from this could be seen as a way of offsetting any perceived loss of monopoly opportunities. Another option is for the copyright to be vested in an independent body like the OER Foundation.

Another potential benefit of this is that the steward could be charged with standardizing a process to make sure that improvements made to their OER suites propagate successfully to all derivative works (where these are allowed), or even just to those using the suite in active teaching. I'd be interested to know what people think of this idea.

Ma te wā
Strypey

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

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"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

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407
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Leigh Blackall

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