Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-sampling - Re: [cc-sampling] artistic credit?

cc-sampling AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of the Creative Commons Sampling license (or license option)

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Glenn Otis Brown" <glenn AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: "Sarah Brown" <sbrown AT old.law.columbia.edu>, dj AT webbnet.com
  • Cc: cc-sampling AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-sampling] artistic credit?
  • Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 19:17:18 -0800

A quick note on credit & attribution:

Sarah [1] and John [2] have the right intuition to emphasize that proper
credit depends a lot on the context. We've already taken this into
account in the original licenses, where the attribution requirement
options reads:

"You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the
Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are
utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the
Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; in the
case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in
the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original
Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").
Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided,
however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a
minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship
credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as such other
comparable authorship credit."

In other words, context-sensitivity is already in our current licenses'
attribution requirement. If we want to require attribution of the
sampling license, then let's do it, but I don't think we need to reinvent
the wheel on this particular aspect of the Sampling license.

Glenn

[1] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-sampling/2003-June/000040.html
[2] https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/cc-sampling/2003-May/000029.html









On Sun, 1 Jun 2003 15:57:20 -0400, "Sarah Brown"
<sbrown AT old.law.columbia.edu> said:
> On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 03:41:04AM -0700, Don Joyce wrote:
>
> > sample licensed artist is reused and unnamed, he could invoke his
> > license
> > and take the sampler to court and force them to attribute him as a
> > source
> > in their work, but nothing else. None of that "damages" stuff, please.
> > But
>
> This scene is hilarious--I imagine the whole drama of a court
> scene--Perry Mason questioning the sampler until he breaks down and
> sobs "Yes, yes, I admit it. It was his picture of a puppy in my
> collage. I knew it all along!".
>
> In reality, an attribution requirement would probably be enforced
> through a threatning lawyer-letter, or perhaps it's actually not legal
> language but just expressing an artist's preference--but it still
> seems silly to me:
>
> - For attribution to have any meaning, it depends on the context,
> tradition, and mores of the community it's viewed in. Different
> diciplines, as well as artistic developments within these diciplines,
> have varied philosophical and political notions of the significance of
> the original "author".
>
> For a scholarly work, attribution is considered essential, meaningful
> and useful: the work wouldn't be "valid" without attribution.
>
> Often, in the tradition of visual art, the origin of a work is totally
> irrelevent. A visual artist might sample another work's "form", but
> for the artist, the "form" is irrelevent. Rather, the cultural context
> and discourse surrounding a paticular "form" is what the artist is
> "using". To force attribution would be to force a misunderstanding of
> what's important--imagine if Duchamp was required to write on the back
> of LHOOQ--"A shout out to DaVinci for providing me with the Mona
> Lisa." It would have focused critics and historian's attention *away*
> from the meaning of this work, instead of towards it. Require
> attribution and you change the way an artist must think--forcing every
> artist to work as if they have been given a strange art-school
> teacher's assingment: "Your artwork should consider color,
> composition, surface, meaning and 'how to encorporate the attribution
> requirement'".
>
> In the medium of film, every person even remotely associated with the
> creation must be mentioned in credits that viewers don't care about or
> watch. Not the most enthusiastic fan that's seen a paticular film
> hundreds of times, nor the critics and historians steeped in the
> minutia of the medium, could care *at all* about the catering company
> credit. The majority of a film's credits consist of entirely useless
> information in relation to the film. Instead, these credits become
> about the film process itself--its highly collaborative and commercial
> nature, never divorced from the intoxicating intangability of
> "fame". This medium created the hyper-rich-and-famous-celebrity, and
> along with it, the process of attribution--it's the sole medium where
> the Janitor's union negotiates so that their contract includes a
> 1-point increase in the font size of their names. In most films,
> credit is a form of "payment" in every contract, specified beforehand
> to an elaborate commercial negotiation.
>
> So an artist might want to play with these cultural meanings. We
> should let them use attribution as they see fit for their work.
>
> To require attribution is very much "of the culture of the
> moment". It's philosophical basis seems to echo copyright law--it's
> mine, so I should get some degree of control how you use it. It
> glorifies the role of the individual creator, focuses attention on the
> "importance" of the work being traced back to the moment the work
> becomes fixed in a tangible media (when in reality, it often lay
> elsewhere). So we should let artists' go ahead and expose and satire
> this cultural trend, but let's not require they do so.
>
> > I think this license might, like a lot of licenses do, espouse
> > etiquette.
>
> When copyright lasts the life of the author plus 70 years, we should
> assume that ettiquette at the beginning of the copyright term has an
> entirely different meaning than ettiquette at the end of a paticular
> copyright term. Even Miss Manners changes her mind--and that's only in
> a lifetime.
---------------------
Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn AT creativecommons.org
+1.650.723.7572 (telephone)
+1.415.336.1433 (mobile)




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page