creative commons through the looking glass

The ABC's Radio National recently broadcast a mashup of content stimulated by the Melbourne Writers' Festival debate Creative commons or common theft? recordings that had Cory Doctorow, (sci-fi author and CC advocate) in the blue corner and Sandy Grant (Senior executive Hardie Grant Publishing, and member of Copyright Agency Limited Board) in the red corner. holding the sweat towels were Mark Williams (Senior adviser with JDR Legal) and CCau's very own Jessica Coates (Project Manager, Creative Commons Clinic). You can listen to the recording here.

It is great to see CC being talked about (again) on the Australian public broadcaster. But as always, I have a few gripes. Damien Carrick opens the podcast by saying:

This morning, Creative Commons: making films, literature or music for free online. It undermines copyright but is it also creating whole new business models and income streams for our artists?

I don't like it. I know Jess tells me that it's to make it sound controversial to keep people listening, but its misinformation and i dont like it. Sorry Damien, Creative Commons does not undermine copyright, it remixes it to create more flexible (and arguably useful) ways of managing copyright. As such, I don't agree that CC "essentially strip copyright of all meaning," but rather breaths new life and meaning into copyright (as I have said before). As Get Creative states, "CC isn't meant to compete with copyright, but to compliment it."

Moving on, Williams opened the debate with a tale of one of the first pirated works. Fergus Hume's detective (self-published) novel, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (first published 1886, you can find it on Project Gutenberg here), was pirated and sold throughout Europe. It paved the way for a new genre of fiction (think Sherlock Holmes). Williams goes on to note that the pirated version went on to sell a huge number of copies, most of the money from which did not find its way into Hume's bank account. So no money there, but as Williams himself attests, "[Hume] was famous, and it enabled him to then write another 100 or so novels..." The problem for most artists, according to Doctorow, is obscurity not piracy. Therefore piracy = reputation (?) Without the piracy, would Hume have had the opportunity to write as much as he did?

Then Grant gets amongst it. I love that Grant refers to CC as having "something of a cult following." Gee, 53 million pages licensed and projects in 66 countries around the world with licences or in the process of drafting them. (Doctorow says 160 million+ works licensed since 2003, but i am not sure where he is getting that figure from. Cory?) That's a really big cult! Maybe we should try to get Creative Commons added to the recognised religions at the next ABS Census?!


SIDE NOTE: Grant highlights my comments about Doctorow as a case study. Doctorow's his prior net identity and fame made it far easier for him to push his novel out than other, totally unknown writers will. CC facilitated the distribution and reuse from a copyright management point of view for sure, but it was Doctorow's charisma that propelled it forward. This is the same argument I make as to why the user-specifies-value Radiohead album In Rainbows worked for them but it is doubtful it would for an emerging band.

Grant later says he doubts that if Doctorow get's as famous as J K Rowling that \ he would still be giving his books away for free. Well Doctorow isn't that famous yet, but he is still quite famous (more so than both Grant and I anyway :p). And how many books is that under CC now Cory? Oh that's right, five, all CC licensed. According to Doctorow,"[His] books have outsold [his] publisher's expectations" and the sales of colleagues of similar skill and career status. He also says that there isn't a single writer (that he knows anyway) "Who has tried this and hasn't done it again."

I like Cory's comment:

"I think that Ms Rowling would be well advised to try it. Is there anyone here who really believes that no one would have picked up Harry Potter and the Sequel of Great Profitability if they'd gotten a free electronic copy. That what was driving people to the store at midnight in costume was the fact that they couldn't lay hands on a digital copy. Indeed, there was a digital copy, 24 hours before that book hit the stands. The $20 million spent on secrecy for that book was not only ineffective at secrecy, but as best understood as a marketing effort."

END SIDE NOTE

CC is also a dog's breakfast to Grant, who says, there's "Really good, quality material, of course like Cory's, sitting along side and mixed up with amateur, unreadable crap." He then proceeds to tout Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur rhetoric, which basically says we're becoming more stupid because anyone can post stuff online. Pffft, elitist wank if ever i heard it. So much for new technologies democratising information production. Not if these guys had the final word. I prefer the Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson's theory in EPIC 2014 which will see individuals filtering content and managing their information intake (which is of course already happening).

The podcast also tackles the quashing of creative innovation that happens in a permissions culture. in my forthcoming documentary paper there is an entire section devoted to this syndrome but you can read a bit on it here. Interestingly, Doctorow also takes a freedom of expression argument, saying:

"The fact is that the purpose of copyright is promote the diversity of expression. It's not to pick the best works and ensure they're produced. The last thing any of us want our governments doing is deciding what's good and what's bad and then crafting law to ensure that only the good things get produced. Before copyright we had patronage–you could paint a painting if the Pope said so, you could make a ceiling up if the Duke said so, you could make a sculpture if the King said so–that produced the occasional nice fresco but it was a poor way to manage diversity of expression in a liberal society. The purpose of copyright was to change the arbitures of expression to the marketplace. And that's been a reasonably good diversifier of who gets to speak and under what circumstances, but the internet turns out to be an even better one."

And on the flip side, Grant says that he's worried that Doctorow's 'papal frescos' are not reality, but rather that democratisation of voices is "encouraging mass graffiti." After all, "that's what's happening on the internet."

Equally amusing is Grant's recommendation that we all read the Australian Copyright Council's fact sheet on CC. SIDE NOTE: The fact sheet is factually incorrect in parts and is now out of date!END SIDE NOTE Grant's five word summary, "Don't sign up too quickly." I'd make the same argument about publishing contracts, record deals, film production contracts, APRA and other royalty collecting arrangements. What are you really giving up and for how long when you enter these relationships? Why didn't you talk about that Grant?

He proceeds to bring up the same arguments always spouted around the irrevocability of CC licences. My response is still the same. If I went out on the street in front of my house right now, and I handed to the first 100 people who passed me a poem I had written, I can hardly come back in a week, a month or 20 years time and demand those 20 people give me back my poem. I'd just look like a madman ranting and raving to no one. Even more accurately, if i went out on the street in front of my house and left 100 copies of that poem on the fence for anyone to take and then went back in side, there is no way i could feasibly demand the poems back post-fact.

Be warned, you run the "risk of being exploited by business professionals," Grant also cautions. He cites the pending Virgin case as evidence. Grant's synopsis:

"Plenty of egg on the face for the photographer, no income, and Virgin got something for nothing."

If all the photographers were so up in arms at this use of their work, why is only one suing? And not for copyright infringement I might add, which is the part that CC is related to. What is of issue is the need for a model release form. And hey, if the great unwashed amateurs on Flickr can tell (and here) that a CC attribution licence doesn't imply a release form was signed , they why the hell did Virgin's lawyers? The licence clearly states otherwise (see 5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer here).

So Grant then continues on, hypothetically asking himself if copyright will remain unchanged. "No," he answers. And will people still be paying for things they really want? He says yes. I say it depends. The 'apple + c' syndrome makes it easy to get content at a reasonable enough quality to be contented. And as Doctorow says:

"...it is wildly implausable that as the year's tick by in this century it is going to get progressively harder to copy. Say what you will about the morals of downloading work, the real politic of downloading work is that it's already practically impossible to exclude someone from a collection of bits, and that impossibility will only increase as the year's tick by.

It is only if the user's (emotional/cultural) investment in that content is deeper than a general interest that they will turn that into economic investment and buy the same thing. Besides, sampling work can lead to sales. As Doctorow says, "It's a really rare, bookish person who would say, "Well having been given all these all these free electronic texts, the last thing i need now is a printed work," after all, even I, who spends every hour god sends reading off a screen, don't like reading long-form works off of screen." He argues that self-discipline drives people off-screen (you've probably already been distracted three times by a new item in your RSS reader, a new email in your Inbox, a quick check of your fav social networking website and countless messages on an IM program), but I think it is more than that. It is hard to be comfortable in front of your computer to watch a feature film or a read a 200 page book. He argues that of the e-books he has, they are more of an enticement to pull down the real-world copy than a substitute for the bookshelf volume.

The CC explanation is very good. Jessica comes across very clear, concise and articulates the licensing model very well.
All and all the entire podcast is very balanced. I think i might cut it up and reuse it in some of my presentations. With the ABC's permission of course :p

END POINT: I notice that the podcast is all rights reserved copyrighted by the ABC, but fails to attribute CC for the parts of the Get Creative video they used.