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

[John Sobol <john AT dx.org>]

Hi

in response to the points being made below...

David wrote:
>  Indeed linked to the question of copyright, which is *still* largely justified and legitimated by a claim to an 'author' who needs protection - when actually it is a huge faceless multinational corporation.
Mark wrote:

>   It's not too hard to figure out that this country is an empire in decline and is run by  and for the corporate/military industrial complex! So we are up against a lot of power fighting to survive in the face of collapsing paradigms all around them. They will not go down quietly! Resistance, lawsuits and  destructive tantrums  (like...er ....wars, for example) are to be expected from these dinosuars. No surprises there.


To my mind the challenge of deciding how best to promote a new IP paradigm begs this crucial question:  what happens when – sometime relatively soon – the economic hegemony that is enabled by the existing IP paradigm is threatened with an imminent fundamental destabilization? 

Unfortunately one reasonable answer is, as Mark suggests, war. Wait - don't scoff and delete. Think about it. I mean, if America will go to war for oil how could it not go to war to preserve IP, which is arguably as essential to the American economy? This in turns leads to: war against whom? A generation of kids – American kids among others – for whom IP equals not Intellectual Property but Inspired Play? Seems an impossible scenario, except that Steve Kurtz's awful situation and the many other excesses of homeland security suggest at least one way that war could be engaged. The RIAA's campaign to bust file-sharers combined with the American Prison Complex suggests another.

Now I'm not saying the worst is going to happen, now or in the future. What I'm saying though, is that in the end there IS going to be a large-scale conflict of some kind. And that's why there needs to be thought put into designing today, strategies that will prevent what I think of as the Copyright Wars of 2041. Or 2021. Or 2011. Because keeping casualties to a minimum seems the most important goal.

Unless of course, you're already surrounded by casualties, unless you're a casualty of capitalism yourself. Maybe then you don't mind a few more. All of the world's mostly poor, mostly brown, mostly oral people on the wrong side of the digital divide are there in part because capitalism requires a lot of people who can be exploited. Maybe that matters. Personally, I'm interested in building bridges between oralists who have a long history of being colonized and economically exploited by literate cultures, and digital activists who are trying to fend off that literate colonial drive in the virtual sphere. In my opinion these two groups have a tremendous amount to gain from each other (and already share largely overlapping value systems). But I find myself wondering, in promoting process-based economic models that explicitly challenge literate capitalism's values (moral, economic and legal) am I trying to start a revolution or stop one? As a rabble-rousing freak I say hit the barricades. As a  parent who's been around, I know that real violence is real bad and I want no part of it. Maybe living in safe and sound Canada has something to do with it too. So I'm confused.

I see Creative Commons as functioning very much as a bridge designed to overcome antagonisms. In other words to prevent a revolution. And this doesn't mean it can't be radical, innovative, paradigm-changing even. But one can ask: as more and harsher Anti-Remix Bills get drafted and passed, as the generation of kids for whom P2P is as natural as breathing gets more and more criminalized and victimized, as – potentially anyway – some programmers in Addis Ababa figure out how to start scratching the internet in a way that really shakes everything up and the virtual realm is targeted as the next place to be liberated from the (anti-IP) terrorists – will we (who is we here?) be better off clinging to a few legally sanctioned rights carved from the vaults of the WIPO tyrants or straddling an array of Apache servers launching a DoS at their palatial Geneva HQ? 

I have no goddam idea actually. But I think these are questions we're going to have to answer all too soon. Of course, maybe there really can be a middle ground, maybe each side will give and take and a compromise will be reached incrementally. I'd genuinely like that. But I'm afraid there's too much need and opportunity on one side and too much power and greed on the other for that. It's a scary combination.

Anyway, thanks for the space...I'd certainly be interested in hearing if anyone else harbors these same concerns or fears...

John Sobol

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www.johnsobol.com
bluesology • printopolis • digitopia