Creative Commons -- what I call "Creative Communism" destroys copyright protection and commerce, destroys value, and does not help artists to survive. It's a vast shill -- indeed a Big Lie, like the original communism of the Soviets. It was designed by people whose main agenda is to undermine capitalism and private property, and who have seized as their ideology the "cover" of seeming to encourage "sharing of content". There are many, many things wrong with the Creative Commons movement, and of course one of the chief ones is that people don't debate it critically, and can be discouraged from doing so.
Let me tell you a story of how I *should* have become a big believer in Creative Commons -- but didn't.
Back in the days when I played Sims offline and made Sims family albums as stories, I founded a group called SimAlbums where you can see some of the essays I posted to read if you join the group (it's no longer active but I keep it as an archive). Here's what happened: back in the dark days right after 9/11, one of the things I did with my kids was make various Sim Family Album "mash-ups". For example, we would take the game Mario, which had this character named "Bowser" who had this song and this bit he did where he had to climb up and down these endless stairs. We made him in the sims, we made an album, and attached a MIDI version of the song -- somehow, it was emblematic of those stairs in the World Trade Center or something. At some point, I wanted to find a picture of a blue sky with clouds to put to make the sky at the top of the stairs. So I hunted around and found a cloud picture on a web site selling prints of clouds, downloaded it, and put it into my Sims game. I noticed that the prints on this site were for sale, so I thought as a courtesy, when I made my screenshot of Bowser in the clouds, that it would be the right thing to credit the photographer and put a link to his site where the pictures were sold as large prints.
So there I was, making a "mash-up" as all the cool kids call it, a user-generated amateur thing, made out of a picture on the Internet. It absolutely never occurred to me at the time that this tiny usage of this picture on a Sims tile would somehow be construed as "theft". After all, I didn't offer it for sale, or in anything remotely resembling its full form as a print. It was a tiny thumbnail, and surely the traffic on my site with the link would drive more traffic to this guy's site and the pictures might sell.
To my shock and surprise, seeing this linkage to his site (that's how he was able to find out about my usage -- I linked to him!), this cloud picture-taker fell on me like a ton of bricks -- or rather the provider, tripod.com. Without contacting me first, he sent a takedown notice immediately to tripod, and an email to me. Tripod instantly took my entire site offline and sent me a routine notice. I was baffled as to why my entire site was down and didn't understand what as happening. If my tiny Sims tile wasn't for sale, what was the issue? I corresponded back and forth with tripod, and after something like a week, they put my site back up when I explained that the cloud screenshot was removed. Meanwhile, Mr. Cloud sent me one email more angry than the next, and demanded that I pay him $700 for the use of his cloud picture (!) -- even when the item was removed. I construed my usage of this picture as legal, and as falling within the doctrine of "fair use" -- a kind of reference. Why would anybody care about a tiny thumbnail of a picture in a Sim house?! I simply refused to be bullied. I kept asking about this everywhere, and trying to read up on the law on it.
Using the tiny version of this cloud in a Sim's house seemed no different to me than putting up a Life magazine photograph in my RL livingroom. It was personal use, and surely fair use -- it didn't involve resale. I found a court case that involved an auction house page that would carry little thumbnails of items for sale on various sites that was sued by some company -- but they prevailed, and won the right to have thumbnail references to other sites. I called this "right-clickers' rights" -- I couldn't comprehend, if you could right-click on a photo and use it for personal use in such a tiny and distorted version as a Sims house, why anyone could possibly try to extract $700 for me. I could understand even if his site offered, say, wallpaper or screensavers -- that might cost money. He might sell those, and people did at the time. But he wasn't doing that. No one mentioned Creative Commons; there was no such thing as a Creative Commons on his site; this was back in 2001, when CC was only just being formed.
I held my ground, and kept fighting Mr. Cloud, telling him that he was being a total ass trying to charge me $700, that my entire non-profit site had been forced to go down for 7 days at a time when I ran a popular site with adults and their kids making Sims stories, and that no harm to his business was intended or caused. If anything, I kept saying, I brought more attention to his site and he would sell prints. He ranted and ranted, in the worst kind of creator-fascist way. I kept studying up on this and referring to the court case with the auction house and others I found, and kept telling him that he was in fact only harming his reputation by picking on an amateur fan site. It never occurred to him to offer a Sims version of his cloud tile for some reasonable fee like $5 or $10; he wanted nothing less than $700 for this thumbnail lol. I kept arguing and finally he backed off. I kept reminding me that if his request had come to me initially asking me personally to remove the cloud because he felt it violated his copyright, I would have complied out of good will, even if I didn't understand his overreach. But his ordering a takedown of my site for a week, and his threatening me with a totally unreasonable fee or face a lawsuit, was simply despicable. Everyone in our group felt the same way.
I didn't grasp then, as I do now, that the ability to right-click isn't something that can be mechanically stopped -- some sites in fact didn't allow right-clicking by disabling the function, and I pointed that out. (You can get around that obviously with PSP or other programs).
So, you would think this experience would set me against people demanding to protect their IP on the Internet. It didn't. It didn't change my basic sense that yes, people have rights to sell stuff and expect that others not be able to sell it, yes they have a right to order takedowns, but they cannot overreach when the site in question is merely making a reference, and when it is not resale of a print or misrepresentation of the work without credit. Indeed, I linked to his site, gave him credit, and did not attempt a resale of his item even for "simoleons".
Ever after, I wondered: why is someone like this such an asshole, trying to terrorize amateurs, when they could accept fair use as helping their business? I *didn't* take "fair use" to mean "any and all copying everywhere for non-commercial use" (as it means now). And I began to wonder: why can't they make it easier to pay a small fee to use somebody's item without fear of reprisals?! THAT is what is needed.
Fast forward to Creative Commons in Second Life. From the very beginning, with Lawrence Lessig and Hamlet Linden Au all over it, I sensed a hoax. It was something that lefties did -- it was contrived and wouldn't likely catch on (they were hawking it in SL in 2004). I noticed that hardly anybody ever came to use the "CC license" machine on "Democracy Island" -- which gathered tumbleweeds from unuse. Nobody ever used CC in SL -- anywhere, even the freebie nuts (some of the put "GNU licenses" on their wares, but they could be a pain in the ass, as they still made their items "no mod," as the famous Jai Nomad did with her hugely prim-heavy homes).
And...Why would they? They have a perfectly good form of "DRM" if you will. Read the latest comments in this thread that shows just how robustly people still uphold the copy/mod/transfer regime in SL or see the usual piggish copyleftist mentality in action in response to desperate content creators facing rampant copying, especially on the new open sims-- one more week, and I'll be blogging on these topics again : )
Meanwhile, zoom out to the fundamentally flawed arguments of CC, that were initially perfectly captured back when it became more popular. The first one was argued in a perfectly reasonable article by John Dvorak titled Creative Commons Humbug -- and never adequately answered. I've added more.
1. You don't need CC to claim copyright. As we've often had to explain on this blog, your copyright is automatically given you under the existing Berne convention and your national law in many cases, i.e. the EU and U.S. Copright self-executes -- you don't need to register anything to claim it.
2. CC isn't what grants you any rights. It is not a legal body. It's just a non-profit with a gimmick. Non-profit bodies don't grant licenses. Governments do. Various licensing bodies in the professions are established like medical or bar associations that are backed up by states that have various board exams and such -- CC isn't anything like that. It's just a bulletin board. You download or copy its type of license to your website or on your book or record, and you have a "license". It is only as effective as the belief in it holds from some sort of enthusiastic community -- which CC's founders have, of course, mercilessly flogged.
3. You don't need CC to share. In order to share you just...share. The Internet is a copy machine -- that's its default. People -- especially kids today -- copy heedlessly. You don't need CC to enable that function. If, on the other hand, you want to encourage getting credit for your freely-distributed work, you can write "(c)" under your photo or essay or book and say that non-commercial use is encouraged. That's all. No need to get encumbered by silly complex CC licenses. There are multiple kinds of them; people argue endlessly on what kind should be used for this or that situation; there are even now lawsuits about CC licenses, one even ruling in favour of a train maker not being allowed to grab a CC design without credit and resell it commercially. But...CC was not required to launch that lawsuit. CC is an add-on.
4. CC in fact discourages the social injunction that used to be taught in families and schools and workplaces that people must be credited for their work as a given, that you never quote something in a paper or a work or a situation without giving credit to the author. "Fair use" and "credit" were something that were instilled into everyone as a social norm and widely understood. You could face serious charges of plagiarism and be expelled from school or disqualified from a course or exam if you failed to observe this law. But by making this a "license" that has to be dispensed, received, and posted, it takes away the cultural norm and substitutes it with the fetish of the license icon. People invest the fetish, and not their teachings, with the power to "protect". That inclines people to think that if they do NOT see the CC icon, they can do what they want. And that's not true -- they can't. And they should give credit in fair use.
5. Absence of CC in fact does not hinder sharing, but its presence certainly does hinder sales. Over and over again, people like Spin Martin think they "need" CC in order to encourage sharing, so that people don't have to hesitate or be confused about what to do and whether they can take a cloud picture for their Sims game. Somebody like Spin or Robert Scoble *wants* you to put their pictures into your Sims game -- they think it's cool. They just want mention of their name somewhere as the author. And they think CC covers this for them. But they've lost a sale. They try to pretend they don't want or need a sale -- but if there were an easy way to make a buck, they would no doubt use it if it could get the cool kids' blessing. They think they are somehow "hindered" by not having CC on their items and that somehow sharing is "discouraged" without this little fetish sign. But that's silly. It doesn't. People should in fact be taught to ask authors if they can use their photos precisely because confusion does endlessly arise even with CC licenses.
Example: I saw a photo of Philip with a space blanket around his bare shoulders sitting in his swim trunks typing on a laptop at Burning Man. It was quintessential Philip. It was used on Vint Falken's blog. The link she gave for it took me to someone's Flickr photo collection. But clicking there, I saw that it wasn't that person's photo, that they had copied it from somewhere else. I found the original photographer finally on his website where...he had did NOT have a CC license but he had a more standard notice that was of the type that said you could NOT copy it and use it without permission. Did Vint ask permission? Likely not, if she took it from the other guy who probably didn't ask either. Both of them, if they even saw the original site, may have seen figured there was the usual CC license and figured "oh, it's ok to copy it" -- but there wasn't any CC license. I couldn't figure out if the guy had in fact let Vint or the other collector use his photo -- his photos in fact were for sale. I thought about asking him for permission for non-commercial use, then got busy. Eventually I'll track this down -- but it's a perfect example, repeated many times every day, of the fact that a CC license means nothing, that there are too many of them, that they are not clear, that they are not necessary and that real people in the real world, even those shooting Burning Man photos of Rosedale, for Christ's sake, put up a standard, normal copyright notice AND SELL THEIR WORK, God bless 'em!.
6. The absolute WORST thing that CC does, however, is to undermine commerce.This is deliberate! This is unforgiveable! This why I call it "Creative Communism". Ever wonder why these people who claim you can make a living with CC don't enable you to have a license that stipulates "pay me here"?! Yes, the actual UNDERMINING of IP starts with the fact that there is NOT a license that says "you can copy me if you pay me, here's where to pay". Funny, that. There isn't any earthly reason for that. You can put PayPal or some other payment system in this day and age. If XStreet was able to use their site for collecting small charges of $2.00 or $1.00 by credit card (LL put an end to that functionaly when it bought it due to fears of chargebacks, I guess), if Amazon.com and other sites take small amounts like that without a problem, then CC could encourage this. It might even set up its own special account with PayPal or some other service and could have, if it had its head on straight, devised its own micropayments system that would have revolutionized the Internet and might have prevented the demise of newspapers.
But it didn't. That's because what CC ultimately is about is undermining private property. The creator is browbeaten into giving his items away for free. Everywhere, in the shill and the mysticism around CC, the mantra goes like this: share your stuff, give it away for free and...consulting will come back to you. Customization will come back to you. Uh...sale of licensing for jingles or machinima or movies will come back to you. Over and over again, people are guilt-tripped into offering their items for free, told them that the CC license will help bring them riches, like some kind of weird collectivism communist MLM pyramid scheme, and over and over again, nobody gets paid. Perhaps they sell one thing. Perhaps they get "exposure". Perhaps they con themselves into thinking they are partaking of some great give and take on the Internet that is "freeing culture". But by and large, most people with CC license do not get paid; it is only a very tiny percent who get paid a living wage.
7. Once given, Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable. Good Lord, why doesn't anybody EVER talk about this, except on obscure law journal pages?! These same bastards who talk about how evil it is for these dead white dudes to lock up copyright for 70 years are happy to lock up your non-paid status FOREVER. You can't change your mind. You can't go back and sell it *anyway* even if people still go on taking it for free. You are as crippled as you are with these silly opensource software licenses that never let you make a buck, all because of the eternal festering wound of Richard Stallman suffering the "lock-up" of his code once in a company. Honestly, it's just infantile. "Finders keepers, losers weepers".
8. Creative Commons recognizes the right, among some of the licenses, of others to take your work and re-release it in modified form for THEIR commercial benefit but it doesn't have a way for you to release it to make YOUR commercial benefit. Now seriously, people, is that fucked OR WHAT? Why don't even the CC hippies rebel at such a fake and exploitative set-up?! There's no reason for it! It feeds into the worst, worst forms of exploitative communism that force people to give for free, but enable others to make a profit, instead of acknowledging at the get-go that GETTING PAID is a normal and natural part of art work.
In most cases, those bragging that CC helps them make a living are using the CC shill in order to provide free loss-leading advertising, in order to pick up lecture fees (about the glories of living off CC lol!) or book deals (about free culture lol!) or various other types of gigs that are largely a function of them having plugged into a network that sustains this religious belief (Tim O'Reilly's books). I think Andrew Keen does an excellent job of putting together the stories and the citations of what a sham this is. Those millions of people on MySpace are getting led down the garden path. Very few bands offering downloads for free that start to number in the millions even in fact get the gigs to pay for themselves. They barely pay their travel and meal expenses for going to the gig. They do not live off CC.
A service called Magnatune got an awful lot of boosting from TechCrunch and others by grabbing the logo "We are not evil," echoing Google, and boasting that they didn't rip off artists, but helped them. They made them give away their tunes for free, however -- job one on the collective farm. (You can buy a CD, but the tracks are all there for free, too, and we have no way of knowing how many buy the CD out of actual decision to buy a CD, and how many buy it as part of a free culture cult following, like a roach clip). Then, they would put them together --hopefully --with movie makers and advertisers and others who needed a song or a track or a jingle, and charged licensing fees. So atop the whole fake giveaway empire, and the giveaways galore, basically what Magnatune does is sell a service whereby it gives you 50 percent of the take if it matches you with, say, a movie-maker who needs your tune. It could be providing this service *without* the free culture shill and the giveaways. It could be providing the groups exposure instead with micropayments, but doesn't for individual tunes (too much work unless you have high volume, I guess). Strip away all the copyleftist free culture hoo-hah, and what you have is a site that makes it easy for people who *want* to pay for licensed music to do so by clicking and paying.
Now...explain why we can't do that for everybody, all consumers, and not just movie companies?!
You never hear anything anymore about Magnatune, hyped so much a few years ago and still in business, but not really cited any more as any "model". It can't be. There is room for exactly one type of this sort of business based on the ideology of copyleftism and "don't-be-evil" anti-RIAA record business -- maybe two, but not really any more -- the sector just isn't that big of a sector. It's not a solution for most bands. Most bands will NOT sell a jingle or sound track to a movie. And, this is all hanging by a thread, because as soon as some thirdworldnik makes a movie that she can't distribute without people objecting that she didn't pay for the songs on the sound track, some people begin to demand that we all give everything away just because it's the groovy third world. Don't make them pay. Make us pay. Eat the rich, etc.
All of this is tremendously tiresome because *people aren't getting paid*. I don't know where David Pogue disappeared to, having been browbeaten himself by copyleftist cult-hero Kevin Kelly into offering his book for free in exchange for seeing if...sales were made of the hard copy (like the Cory Doctorow shill). Nobody ever REALLY tracks this stuff seriously, to see if, outside the little magic circle of the copyleftist lecture/book circuit itself, it can succeed.
In other words, if you start something like Bob Sucks, and you are known as a groovy "information wants to be free" copyleftist, and you have some dumb CD or t-shirt, your friends and some cool kids who happen think it's cool to push CC and copyleftism might in a sense send you a tip by buying your shirt. But...the next 20 Bobs who Suck will get nowhere. There isn't a market for it. It's not a solution.
Oddly enough, the Wharton professor so worried about on Techcrunch, all kinds of debates about this topic now, are increasingly referring to the virtual world currency and sale with microcredits as the wave of the future. Indeed it could be. There are people seriously working on Facebook currencies and a booming industry that not many people focus on is various micropayment and game token systems related to NetFlix and other services, most of which don't cash out to real money, but could if set up that way (entire workshops were devoted to these companies at Engage! Expo). This sector is getting more robust, it will shake out in a few years, and we will see the Facebook bucks that have people starting to pay each other for various things, perhaps at first only charities or pictures, in time for other things like having a good post or a good reputation.
This *has* to come, because people *have* to get paid. They cannot live on air. Creative Commons will be seen as a sidetrack, as a time-waster which wound people around in circles for a few years before they were able to shrug off Commissars Lessig and Doctorow and others preaching the copyleftist shill. More and more people will come forward to tell us that the comrade-emperors have no clothes. That only a tiny number get paid. That most people, as hard as they try to tell themselves they are "adding value" or "freeing culture" or taking communion in some vast cyberspace church, are feeling shafted, even bitter.
Increasingly, they will be wondering, as I have wondered for the last 8 years since looking at clouds from both sides now, why there isn't an easy system to PAY -- and in its place, merely an easy system to SHARE and undermine private property.
If you read Lessig's Free Culture (yes, I need to get back to my installment denunciation of this AWFUL book), you'll see that he diverges from the facts and engages in subtle subterfuge on nearly every page. While feigning to care about giving copyright, he takes it away (as CC does). He invokes this artificial notion of the dead weight of the past.
In fact, as I said in confronting this P2p Foundation gang in a long and rancorous debate, when people invoke this supposed dead weight of the 70-year copyright that they feel is crippling their creative freedom, they cannot cite any concrete examples. I cited my little cloud story. I could have paid $5 for my cloud tile, the way I paid various Sim furniture sites for really top quality content for my little Sims games. But...there was no way to do it. And I conceded, if asked to take down a cloud tile, that if that was the author's wish, I should respect it. Why not? It was excessive, it was over the top, but...it was *his cloud*. There was never, for me, any question whatsoever that his property rights should be destroyed.
After finishing Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, I had to conclude, although he doesn't quite come out and say it, that this cult heavily relies on everything being free, because if it had to be paid for...nobody would pay for the crappy amateur content. Especially with so much professional content out there! To get recognized, to take root, the culty amateur had to "free" everything so that by contrast, paid content wouldn't show him up. And he is never tested. Because the CC license is "eternal," he can't call it back and see if he *could* get paid.
Ultimately, my critique of Creative Commons doesn't need me to be persuasive, because Second Life itself is an abundantly clear example of what happens when a compay encourages users to make user-generated content, recognizes their IP, and lets them sell it: they don't need or want or use Creative Commons licenses.
That's why I hope to God Raph Koster doesn't cave to pressure from his peers in San Francisco in the Silicon Valley setting to make CC be the means by which IP and "sharing" is taken care of MP. There is no need for it to be imposed as a game function or inworld function, people are free to use it or not on their worlds (and I bet they will NOT unless they are groupies and copyleftists to start with, once the world gets big enough). I also hope fervently that it won't wind up being incorporated into the MMOX set-ups, although it's of course being pushed by that gang. As Joi Ito gets more involved in spimes, as Lawrence Lessig, who has now left CC to go push for "transparency in government" (i.e. "consulting my way to circles of power"), perhaps CC will languish and wither. One can only hope. It is crippling the future of paid content on the Internet that we could have once we get these social engineers out of the way and let the real businesses handle how people will make a living.
Seems contradictory then. If it's not a contract you can be sued for breaching, why have one in the first place? Seems meaningless. And maybe that's the point then.
Posted by: Darien Caldwell | April 08, 2009 at 11:54 AM
Darien, copyright is a law that you can be sued or prosecuted for breaking. The CC licenses are a way of saying "people have permission to do X with this work in circumstances Y, and therefore won't be sued or prosecuted for doing so, even though that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright."
So the CC licenses are not contracts, they are, well, licenses. (Wikipedia has decent articles on both that help make the distinction.)
When the copyright on a thing expires, then people can do what they like with the thing regardless, and the CC license (whose sole function is to let you do things that you couldn't otherwise do) becomes pretty much meaningless (in my non-lawyer understanding at least).
It's like if I give you a key to a closet: this lets you do things that you couldn't otherwise, but once the door vanishes, the key is sort of irrelevant.
Prokofy is right that the CC licenses are things you can't really take back. If you've said to someone, "here, you can use this for anything you want, as long as you mention my name in your documentation", it would sort of defeat the purpose if you added "unless I change my mind later, of course", because then no one sensible would risk making attributed use of the thing, for fear that once they became successful you would "change your mind" and start demanding half their profits.
Putting a CC license on something doesn't prevent you from also having a version that you make money from. You can for instance sell someone the right to make commercial use of a thing, even if you've already released that thing under one of the "nc" (non-commercial use) licenses. You can sell someone the right to prepare derivative works based on a thing even if you've also released it under a CC "no derivative works" license. So the CC licenses are by no means incompatible with selling stuff.
It's true there's no CC license that says "you can do X with this thing only if you've paid me $Y via method Q". In general I think if you're planning to make money with something, you're probably better off paying a real live lawyer to make up the license for it, rather than using a pre-made one off the net. :)
To my thinking, one reason the CC licenses can be nice and generic and low-stress is precisely because they're aimed at situations where there's no money involved. If you want a good watertight commercial agreement, that's sort of more work. And it may well be that the people doing CC stuff currently are just less interested in those cases.
Now that I think of it, it'd be very interesting to see someone put forward, in good faith, a proposal for a set of "payme" CC-style licenses; even if the CC folks themselves didn't want to adopt them, a CC-like effort designed to make it easier for people to create and use simple "license for money" arrangements would be a fun thing to have.
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 01:21 PM
"a CC-like effort designed to make it easier for people to create and use simple "license for money" arrangements would be a fun thing to have."
We do have that, Dale, and, you're right, it is fun. It's called the free market. :-P
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | April 08, 2009 at 01:28 PM
/me grins at Ichabod.
I meant something a bit more detailed than "the free market". I agree the free market is fun! And it makes great pizza.
I was thinking more along the lines of a site that would, say, ask you some questions about your product and how you want to control and sell and license it, and would give you the draft legal language to use to do that. Sort of like what CC does, only when there's money involved.
And when I put it that way, it occurs to me that the most likely reason that no one (including the CC folks) have done this is that the potential liability (if a license that you generate had a bug in it) might be significant, since money is involved.
Oh, and on the "license vs. contract" issue, I was rereading the actual CC license legalese, and the wording explicitly acknowledges that some jurisdictions might regard the license as a contract, and in that case it says that it is granting you the listed rights in exchange for you abiding by the terms of the license (attribution or whatever), and that it expires when the copyright on the thing expires. So we don't have to just assume that the CC licenses stop when copyright expires, even if that seems obvious; they explicitly state that they do.
If that's any comfort. :)
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 01:35 PM
Once again, Dale-the-tool is filled with reductivist, literalist arguments that ultimately seek to undermine commerce and defend the technocommunism of Creative Commons. Not surprising, comrades!
>If you've said to someone, "here, you can use this for anything you want, as long as you mention my name in your documentation", it would sort of defeat the purpose if you added "unless I change my mind later, of course", because then no one sensible would risk making attributed use of the thing, for fear that once they became successful you would "change your mind" and start demanding half their profits.
Too bad. They can learn the social injunction that exists -- and long existed -- without CC which is that you don't take people's work until you attribute them, and only for fair use. Naturally, Google has helped erode this concept of what "fair use" means.
If someone who created a thing wants to change their mind about it, that's legitimate and they can do that. The CC license has no legal authority, and ascribing legal authority to it (which its founders crave and try to snooker you into doing) only perpetuates the madness. All that happens is that IF you go after someone who used your item for free when you issued the prior "license," then they *might* be able to say, "but you issued this CC license before". I'd love to see a court case on that. Perhaps the creator who changed his mind would lose, perhaps not. CC "licenses" are only a game, a token in a game.
The real issue is that the person who created something gets to change his mind, its his item, and henceforth he *could* change his mind, and if he chose NOT to go after those already making the free use, what difference could it make?
In fact, Dale then repudiates this point himself by saying that there is nothing to stop you from starting to sell your item commercially after you gave it away with CC.
Well, wait a minute, Comrade, which is it? A second ago you said nobody can ever change their mind on their CC "license" because this would cause fears of the risk of using CC. Well, good! Nothing should be forever!
Of course, this is only an abstraction. The world does not abound with examples (er, could you find me even one) of people who issue their creation for free to everybody, then suddenly issue it for pay as a license for one commercial use. That's because nobody in their right mind would buy something they can get and use for free if that's all they want to do, *use it*.
If they want to resell it, then CC simply doesn't help them. They'd have to go to this creator *anyway* because there *is no license to say 'pay me then use it*. They'd have to negotiate with them as they do in any RL situation outside the virtual world of CC (and it truly is a virtual world of techocommunist utopianism).
Oh, most likely people can find examples of this, where people gave away their songs for free on Magnatune to the masses, but if some company needed an advertising jingle, *then* they'd buy it for money (I'd like to see whether this system is really widespread, or whether it sustains bands *really* -- we never get the numbers on that. Like we never get the true and actual numbers of Doctorow's books).
The fact is, this idea of "liability" from a "pay me" license is a fiction that overly lawyerly types severed from real-world practice like Lessig, and immersed in ideology, in fact foist on you. There is absolutely nothing to stop you from creating a payment system. Nothing.
CC is incompatible with life, like all communism. If you give away stuff for free, you can't really expect to sell it and live. The few exceptions that exist within the copyleftist cultural virtual world don't help make the case because they are aberrations based on the culture itself, like selling hippie roach clips and hippie culture. Few people make a living selling bongs and roach clip holders.
Thriving sites like etsy.com where people sell their crafts without any CC nonsense for money let us know that this is possible, it works and it doesn't need all the lawyering up that people imagine. Part of the CC undermining of commerce is to make it seem like you need lawyers like Lessig for commerce, which is something that is some kind of scary 'controlled substance'.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 08, 2009 at 03:06 PM
"" In fact, Dale then repudiates this point himself by saying that there is nothing to stop you from starting to sell your item commercially after you gave it away with CC.
Well, wait a minute, Comrade, which is it? A second ago you said nobody can ever change their mind on their CC "license" because this would cause fears of the risk of using CC. ""
I think you're reading a little too fast, Prokofy.
The CC licenses do grant a perpetual right, it's in the wording; so if you want to keep the ability to change your mind later, you have to use some other license instead. But that doesn't mean that you can't grant a CC (perpetual) license for non-commercial uses one week, and sell a license for a commercial use the next week. Or that you can't grant a (perpetual) CC license for attributed use one month, and sell a license for nonattributed use (to someone willing to pay for the privilege of not having anyone else's name in their documentation, say) the next. That's not changing your mind about the original CC licensing at all; that license applies just as it originally did, for those purposes that it originally did.
There's no contradiction there.
When I said that no one sensible would use something under a "you can use this unless I change my mind later" license, you replied:
"" Too bad. They can learn the social injunction that exists -- and long existed -- without CC which is that you don't take people's work until you attribute them, and only for fair use ""
but I'm afraid I haven't the foggiest notion what you meant by that; it seems to have nothing at all to do with what I was saying. My point, and it seems pretty obvious, is that licenses and contracts of this kind hardly ever say "unless I change my mind later" in them (at least not without a stiff penalty clause), because if they did the other party wouldn't want to risk their business or whatever on the possibility that the other party would change their mind. I'm not sure if you were disagreeing with that, or what...
I'm also not sure what you mean when you say the CC license has no legal authority. Anything anyone says about what rights they reserve or grant potentially has legal authority, whether it's marked "CC" or not.
Ask any lawyer if he'd be willing to take on a case where you've posted something in public with a statement that you grant everyone in the world a perpetual right to use it as long as they attribute it to you, but now you've changed your mind and you want to sue someone who used it to make money, for half their profits. I expect you will be gently told that attempting to win such a case would not be a good use of your time. This has nothing do to with whether or not the license that you posted the thing under said "CC" on it or not; it's because of the words of the license, not where it came from.
I'm not one of those people who's sanguine about how it would still be easy to make money in a world where all content was free to share; I think it's not nearly as obvious how that would work (or that it would work) as some people think. I would not claim that everyone who makes a living off of copyrighted content now would do just as well or better if the notion of copyright just went away; I don't think that's something that we know at all.
But on the other hand I don't see the Creative Commons licenses as trying to bring about the destruction of copyright. I believe the CC folks when they say that they just want to make it easier for people who *want* to grant the world some rights to do so. It may be that there are some people who like the CC licenses who also want to smash world capitalism and destroy the notion of copyright; but I think that saying that everyone involved in the CC stuff, and the CC stuff itself, is inherently aimed at that, is an error.
I expect we differ on this. :)
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 04:04 PM
"If someone who created a thing wants to change their mind about it, that's legitimate and they can do that. The CC license has no legal authority, and ascribing legal authority to it (which its founders crave and try to snooker you into doing) only perpetuates the madness."
The CC license does have legal authority. That authority arises from the right of the copyright holder to give permission to people to use their copyrighted work and to put limitations on that permission.
It may help to ponder proprietary licenses (EULAs) rather than CC or free software licenses when thinking about expiry or revocation. Can you picture any court actually ruling in favour of a proprietary developer believing they can revoke a EULA unless the EULA specifically says "this license may be revoked"?
There's a pretty simple logic to this:
If someone gives you permission to do something and doesn't say "I might change my mind later" it defies justice to say that they're entitled to arbitrarily change their mind.
If I own a piece of land and tell you that "it'd be trespassing if you enter my land without permission, but you have my permission to walk across my land on Wednesday afternoons for so long as I own it" then one Wednesday afternoon suddenly decide i've changed my mind and call the police to arrest you for trespass is that right? Yes, the land is mine - but if I don't want you walking across it I should not give you my license to walk across it. Even worse, if I say "yes you may build a house on my land so long as you don't rent it out" and then change my mind, should I be entitled to demolish your house? Replace house with "derivative work" and you should hopefully see what i'm getting at.
"In fact, Dale then repudiates this point himself by saying that there is nothing to stop you from starting to sell your item commercially after you gave it away with CC.
Well, wait a minute, Comrade, which is it? A second ago you said nobody can ever change their mind on their CC "license" because this would cause fears of the risk of using CC. Well, good! Nothing should be forever!"
This is much simpler then you're making out. As copyright holder, you can license the same work to multiple people in different ways. In granting a license for commercial use to person A, you aren't revoking the license for noncommercial use from person B.
If you do honestly believe by the way that any copyright license can be revoked for any reason, then I seriously hope you don't have any freebies inworld, or any books or DVDs, or any software on your computer. These are all copyrighted works with attached licenses (even if the license is only the implied license granted by sale). The copyright holder, if your view is correct, still "owns" all of them and can revoke the license from any of them.
Here's something that seems to have been overlooked:
Copyright licenses are not unique to creative commons and free software, they're used pretty much in all creative works everywhere. Anytime you obtain someone else's creative work, there's a license that allows you to do so, or it's simply illegal for you to obtain it. This license can be written out formally, or it can be a document that gives you the relevant permission, but if your view is correct then any of these creative works can be "taken back" by the copyright holder.
Do you honestly believe that?
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | April 08, 2009 at 04:05 PM
"This license can be written out formally, or it can be a document that gives you the relevant permission"
should be
"This license can be written out formally AS a document that gives you the relevant permission, or it can be the implied license given when you purchase it"
Note to self: sleep more
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | April 08, 2009 at 04:12 PM
time to buy and use a digicam
Posted by: bill gibson | April 08, 2009 at 05:51 PM
Anyone making claims here about what they think they can interpret about CC "licenses" being "legal," please cite chapter, verse, date, time, state for the judicial decisions that support your claims. Otherwise they are speculative.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 08, 2009 at 06:14 PM
Hi, Bill, you know, I just got one for my daughter's birthday, I'm not a camera type, can't really work them but she loves them and has had them for years, and other friends use them and upload stuff.
I love that picture of the ice on Georgia bay.
Do you still try to sell your work in SL? is that viable at all? Seems like it would be for no cost.
Also, do you put CC licenses on your works? I don't see them. Not that I'd want you to!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 08, 2009 at 06:15 PM
What's the difference between putting a CC Attribution license on a work and simply not defending your copyright when that work is used by someone else? Why do I have to grant a specific permission? If it's my wish to share the thing freely, I don't need the license to do that. I just say to myself, well, if someone uses it, cool, I'm not going to take them to court over it. If they claim it's their own work then I might consider it but I don't need a CC license to make my case. Further, if an entity of which I do not approve decides to take my work and use it for their own purposes then I can come down on them as hard as I am able because I didn't attach some trendy legalese to my thing. It seems to me the more flexible and potent practise is precisely the one we have in existing copyright. Seriously, I do not understand the need for CC.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | April 08, 2009 at 06:41 PM
"Anyone making claims here about what they think they can interpret about CC "licenses" being "legal," please cite chapter, verse, date, time, state for the judicial decisions that support your claims. Otherwise they are speculative."
"Consent and waiver of rights
(1) It is not an infringement of any of the rights conferred by this Chapter to do any act to which the person entitled to the right has consented.
(2) Any of those rights may be waived by instrument in writing signed by the person giving up the right.
(3) A waiver—
(a) may relate to a specific work, to works of a specified description or to works generally, and may relate to existing or future works, and
(b) may be conditional or unconditional and may be expressed to be subject to revocation;
and if made in favour of the owner or prospective owner of the copyright in the work or works to which it relates, it shall be presumed to extend to his licensees and successors in title unless a contrary intention is expressed."
"A licence granted by a copyright owner is binding on every successor in title to his interest in the copyright"
Copyright, designs and patents act 1988
Sections 87-90
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | April 08, 2009 at 07:10 PM
Case law regarding various free software and CC licenses:
http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions/08-1001.pdf
http://www.jbb.de/judgment_dc_frankfurt_gpl.pdf
http://blog.veni.com/?p=494
http://www.a42.com/node/157
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=704240
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6052292.html
You want more rulings from various different courts?
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | April 08, 2009 at 07:16 PM
"What's the difference between putting a CC Attribution license on a work and simply not defending your copyright when that work is used by someone else?"
The difference is that you're removing uncertainty and liability for your users. Nobody sensible is going to want to touch a copyrighted work without a license and do anything serious with it, since doing so is a constant liability.
"I just say to myself, well, if someone uses it, cool, I'm not going to take them to court over it."
You say that to yourself, great - but if you really want people to use the work you need to say it to them too.
"If they claim it's their own work then I might consider it but I don't need a CC license to make my case"
No, you don't indeed. They need the license to make their case - it need not be a CC license specifically but they need some form of license from you if they don't want to be open to the legal risks.
"Further, if an entity of which I do not approve decides to take my work and use it for their own purposes then I can come down on them as hard as I am able because I didn't attach some trendy legalese to my thing."
If that "trendy legalese" correctly sets out the ways in which you don't want your work used, then same situation.
"It seems to me the more flexible and potent practise is precisely the one we have in existing copyright."
This is a huge misconception I keep seeing - nothing about CC licenses is at all incompatible with or different from "existing copyright law". They use copyright law as the means of enforcement. There's no real separation between "copyrighted" and "licensed", a work with a license on top is still copyrighted - just the copyright holder has waived some of their exclusive rights to whomever may obtain it.
"Seriously, I do not understand the need for CC"
The reason is to make it simpler to set out what permissions you are giving to people as regards your copyrighted work without them needing to contact you in every single instance and to do so in a form that's rock solid legally.
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | April 08, 2009 at 07:24 PM
"What's the difference between putting a CC Attribution license on a work and simply not defending your copyright when that work is used by someone else?"
There are a number of differences:
If you don't put out any explicit license, then people who respect copyright will either not re-use the thing at all, or will write you asking for permission; if you want nice people to be able to use your thing without having to ask you, the CC license enables that. (That's the main *point* of the CC license, in fact! The rest of these things are minor in comparison.)
If you put out a CC attribution license, you're expressing a wish to have your name mentioned when the thing is used. If you just put it out with no license, no one is incented to acknowledge you (i.e. it will be used only by people comfortable with breaking copyright, and there's no reason to think that they will use your name; "but Your Honor I put his name in the acknowledgements!" is no defense against a copyright suit).
If you don't put out any sort of license, and you see lots of people re-using it but take no action, and then someone wealthy uses it and you think "aha, I'll get him!", there's a chance (especially if you, say, intentionally wait until the wealthy person has rolled out his product that incorporates your work in seventeen countries) that you will find yourself facing a reasonable defense based on one or another sort of estopple or laches (the argument that because you had taken no action on prior infringements the defendant fairly concluded that the work was available for general use; that you were being a Bad Person by waiting until the infringement got really bad before acting, in hopes of a bigger settlement, etc). The courts do use this kind of thing to find against people that annoy them in an abusing-the-law sort of way.
But the main difference is that by using a CC attribution license you're expressing something completely different than if you don't. :) So if the statement that you make with the license more accurately reflects what you'd actually like people to do than the statement that you make without it, posting the license seems only sensible...
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 07:44 PM
/me waves at Gareth. :)
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 07:46 PM
No, um, nice try at fisking and playing "gotcha", Gareth, but it's not links to just any old case law about how CC licenses are accepted by a court of law. That isn't at all what was said.
Here is what I said:
"please cite chapter, verse, date, time, state for the judicial decisions that support YOUR CLAIMS"
That was in response to *your claims* which you made here:
"This is much simpler then you're making out. As copyright holder, you can license the same work to multiple people in different ways. In granting a license for commercial use to person A, you aren't revoking the license for noncommercial use from person B."
Pretty fancy footwork. CC does not enable you to provide multiple licenses like this at a whim. You have to pick! Only copyright law itself does! So suddenly, you come scurrying back to the principles of copyright law when it suits you.
Um, so, please find a case in a court of law where this notion of multiple licenses and "I get to play both CC and copyright at a whim" was upheld in a court of law *where CC was involved*. Go ahead, we're waiting. Again, find law that *backs up the claims you make for the flexibilities and advantages of CC over ordinary copyright law," not some case that merely recognzies copyright law for CC, too (which is all these are).
Once again, everything about this statement is false:
"The CC license does have legal authority. That authority arises from the right of the copyright holder to give permission to people to use their copyrighted work and to put limitations on that permission."
The CC "licence" comes from a non-profit, non-legal, non-government body which just "says so". It's merely a blue ribbon you pin on your cow and claim it's a prize-wainning cow. It means nothing.
Copyright is inherent. The limitations on it spring exactly from that right, not "limitations you put on it". The limitations exist prior to anything "you put on it" and it's the *undoing* of the pre-existing limitations that matter, which you don't need CC to arrange. Indeed, this is one of the biggest blurring of distinctions of CC -- they imply that they have bolstered people's rights, when all they have done is try to automate their *permissions* and make it a "system". But it is unnecessary, because you can grant permissions without automation and it's to your advantage to do so to make sure there isn't abuse of your wishes.
Dale, uh, no, I didn't read too fast, but your gotcha claims here hinge on your notion that the CC license "means something". It merely layers over what is actual copyright.
And no, the will of those who established Creative Commons isn't at all about "helping creators share their work". That's the cover story. The real story is "browbeating people into giving away their work," "refusing to create a system for people to get paid for the work" and "locking up content as free and making it impossible to commercialize it except by special authoriztion which brings you back to the place you were without CC".
Everything about the comrades is clear: they wished to undermine trademark, copyright, private property, commerce, to usher in more quickly a world of "sharing", by holding out the prospect of "making money from consulting" or "making money from customization for firms" -- and imagining that these capitalist firms would always remain available in this system to always pay more for -- or pay anything at all! -- for this free stuff. Why should they? It has no value. It's the rare exception that some company will pay for something that is released as free already everwhere. It's not enough of a business model to sustain an entire economy of people doing that. It works for a few, mainly within the CC culture mafia itself.
And that's another destructive aspect of CC I should have described -- that it relies on capitalism to go on existing to feed it, even as it undermines commerce. Pretty awful stuff.
I already noted at the outset that there is are one or two cases where people who released content as free and copyable were able to sue a company that used this content in a product they resold, without credit, and without compensation (which wasn't sought for non-commercial use).
I blame CC totally for this -- they could have set up a master website like Magnatune or etsy.com did, enabling people to post content and get paid for it. But they were lazy and unaccountable and ideological.
So in this case the CC issuer one the suit against the train company which then had to stop selling this item from what I gather.
Again, there aren't any cases -- it is mere speculation -- that illustrate the ability of someone to call back their free content and begin to charge -- although likely they *would* have a case because CC means nothing, and the idea that CC is perpetual means nothing, and copyright is yours to do with as you will, and if you change your mind and want to sell something, you can.
ichabod is right. You don't need this. Period.
What happens is that people keep claiming you do "need it" because they say copyright obtains. But copyright needs to be defended to obtain. If you do nothing for ages and your stuff is copied all over, it might become that much harder to claim (worlds.com anyone?)
Each time people argue about CC here, they put up this notion that sharing is somehow some idealized optimal good. It isn't. Getting paid is the ideal. If I like somebody's picture on Flickr, I can just look at it on Flickr. I don't *have* to put it on my website, too, or make a greeting card or poster out of it. But if it were easy to pay that person some small cost for my use of it that way, then I would! And CC has lost this opportunity to make an ebay out of people's digital works.
That was deliberate.
They are destructive.
The artist is ultimately the loser.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 08, 2009 at 08:29 PM
Neither Gareth or Dale are lawyers. They've also mixed up software cases and principles here with CC which is for content (CC even tells you not to use CC for software).
Some would argue that all virtual world items are "software" and therefore CC doesn't apply and one of the others should be used if you've a mind to apply freeness, i.e. GNU.
Both Gareth and Dale do not argue in good faith. They Fisk, Haskell, obsess, literalize, pester, and try to play "gotcha" not to get at the truth of the matter -- how best to organize the economy of a virtual world and indeed all the Internet -- but merely to try to harass and bully me. As such, I don't much see the point of answering them, except merely to help weak minds easily swayed.
Strong minds aren't easily swayed because they get it -- nobody needs CC. They have copyright. What they need is a system to get paid that also helps them with DMCA takedowns. They need payment and DMCA enforcement far more than they need copyright, because copyright is expensive to maintain (and hard). CC doesn't make it easier or less expensive to defend copyright. You can put a CC license on a SL dress til the cows come home and you have nothing but cows and a stolen dress. Only takedown enforcement helps maintain copyright, given the culture that is rampant these days of theft and "sharing".
CC is part and parcel of that culture making it seem as if the absence of a CC shield on something means you can take it. They actively disseminate and inculate the culture of taking and sharing and making everything free -- and that's why people steal.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 08, 2009 at 08:37 PM
"If you do nothing for ages and your stuff is copied all over, it might become that much harder to claim (worlds.com anyone?)"
Worlds.com suit is around patents, not copyrights. They have different rules of law dealing with usage and claims of infrigement.
Just trying to keep facts clear:) and strengthen the fact and case made here that no "artist or creator" needs CC.
Posted by: cube inada | April 08, 2009 at 09:16 PM
Are people really being browbeaten into making their works available via CC licenses? That would be a bad thing. Can you point to any examples of it? (Actual pointers to actual examples, not vague memories or "of course everybody knows" kinds of things, ideally.)
I'm not sure what parts of the things that Gareth and I have been saying you consider to be harassing and bullying of you. We've just been expressing different opinions, and correcting you when you're factually wrong. If you can point to what parts of anything I've said that you consider rude or harassing or bullying, I'll try to avoid repeating the offense.
Gareth's examples, Prokofy, were just exactly what you asked for: the part of the legal code, and some court opinions, that say that copyright owners can grant rights through written instruments. Of course it doesn't explicitly mention Creative Commons in the law! It doesn't explicitly mention anyone else that might write legal language for someone, either. And I'm not sure what kind of legal cases explicitly about CC you'd expect to find, either: people *not* suing when people take actions that the CC licenses grant them the right to take aren't going to show up in court files after all.
It's disingenuous to say that people interested in CC "come scurrying back to copyright law when it suits you". CC is *based on* copyright law. CC licenses are licenses that would make no sense if copyright law were not in place. The CC licenses are not some kind of alternative or competitor to copyright law; I don't think anyone's suggesting that. Except maybe you. :)
"CC is part and parcel of that culture making it seem as if the absence of a CC shield on something means you can take it."
How has anyone or anything "made it seem" that way? That's completely wrong, as anyone who understands anything about either copyright law or the CC licenses knows. The CC licenses are not, and are not pretending to be, a "shield" on content.
The CC licenses *grant* certain rights. How could anyone think that, if those rights are not explicitly granted, then they must obtain anyway? That's silly!
I don't know why you keep emphasizing that the people who wrote the CC licenses are "a non-profit, non-legal, non-government body" (not sure what you mean by "non-legal", as there were definitely lawyers involved). If someone licenses one of his works using one of the licenses, what matters is what the license says, not who wrote it. When a creator releases a work with certain words accompanying it, those words have their effects *no matter who wrote them*. The words could have come to the creator in a dream, or appeared at the bottom of a teacup; it doesn't matter.
If I put out a picture, and accompany it with a document saying "... Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below ..." and so on, then I have granted the public a certain right. What that right is and whether I have validly granted it has nothing to do with who originally put those words together: whether it was an expensive lawyer that I hired, or my Uncle Ferd who's a retired attorney, or if I wrote it myself by piecing together things I found on the web: if I say those words, I thereby grant a certain right.
I agree with you completely that no one *needs* CC. People can always hire a lawyer themselves, or find a license somewhere else that looks like it might serve, or decide to just say "all rights reserved, contact me if you want to work something out". But someone who wants to grant certain rights to some work of theirs without having to spend money, or take a chance on homemade legalese, or deal individually with every person who wants to use their stuff, might very well *want* CC, and be happy to have it.
I'm not sure what you mean by "you can grant permissions without automation and it's to your advantage to do so to make sure there isn't abuse of your wishes". As I say, you can always make up your own legal language, or hire someone to make it up for you. But the CC people have made it possible to grant rights conveniently without doing either. I think that's nice of them.
(And I don't know what you mean by "make sure there isn't abuse of your wishes". The CC folks just provide the legal language; why would using that language, rather than some other language that I got somewhere else for the same purpose, make it any more likely that my wishes will be abused?)
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 09:27 PM
On "I already noted at the outset that there is are one or two cases where people who released content as free and copyable were able to sue a company that used this content in a product they resold, without credit, and without compensation (which wasn't sought for non-commercial use)", do you have any more details or pointers? I'd be interested in reading about that. I assume the suit was won because the CC license was one of the "non-commercial" ones, and the defendant was using the stuff for commercial purposes?
Posted by: Dale Innis | April 08, 2009 at 09:38 PM
Any chance you might hold yourself to the same standards you demand of others, Prokofy?
Thought not.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | April 08, 2009 at 09:52 PM
"If you put out a CC attribution license, you're expressing a wish to have your name mentioned when the thing is used."
But WHY oh WHY do I have to ask for such a thing? Isn't it automatic that when you put forward work that isn't your own that you credit the creator? Do we need laywers to legalese what was common fucking sense when we wrote our projects on dinosaurs in grade three? You quote; you cite. It isn't about legal mumbo jumbo, it's about doing the right thing. Prok's question is valid. Does Creative Commons (and its ilk) undermine what was already understood by those seven year old bibliographers?
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | April 09, 2009 at 02:33 AM
Yes, ichabod, I think it most certainly does undermine not only the social injunction but private property and intellectual property as concepts bound up with commerce. And that is no accident, comrade.
It's really a very sinister implication of CC that you "need" this license to share -- when you don't, for two reasons:
1. Everybody already steals precisely because the Internet engineers made it so they can and provided no furtherance to the old social injunction against theft.
2. People can ask you, if they don't in fact steal, and you can share that way, without CC.
So by issuing this "license," CC tells you three things:
1. We will help you share as if we grant this power, and not the theft of the Internet or our bad engineering.
2. We will browbeat you into sharing in case you had any vestigal proprietary interests lurking in your unreconstructed new consciousness.
3. We will make sure you get attributed because people have stopped doing that.
Then, it deals the final blow not only to capitalism and intellectual property, but the rule of law, by saying the following:
1. We are not a real licensing authority but we will pretend we are, here's a license you don't in fact need, but it's all part of legitimizing us as licensers.
2. We won't offer a type of license that says "share this if you pay me" because we don't care if you get paid and we hate commerce and capitalism.
3. By blanketing all the cool websites with our shield, we will help further the Internet stealing culture because any site without such a shield will appear to be "fair game" outside our "club".
Yes, they undermine what was understood by the dinosaur writers. But that's deliberate. And they don't care.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | April 09, 2009 at 04:13 AM