ABC Radio National’s The Law Report recently did a feature on Creative Commons.
It predominantly features extracts of Cory Doctorow and Sandy Grant (member of Copyright Agency Limited Board) debating at the 2007 Melbourne Writers festival, with interstitials from Mark Williams (Senior adviser with JDR Legal and copyright lawyer) and Jessica Coates (Creative Commons Clinic).
Listen here.
It’s well worth a listen as it presents the perspectives of both the believers and the skeptics in the (commercial) merit of Creative Commons.
As is often the case, I am in agreement with Cory.
My thoughts . . .
Sandy Grant: I think it may be worth your having a brief look at a book, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, and he points out the ease of posting content, the Creative Commons ease. I mean is changing your intellectual culture for the worse, it’s swamping vital and interesting information, replacing it with endless bloggers reinforcing their own prejudices rather than expanding their horizons.
As a blogger who reinforces his own prejudices, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I do take issue with the assumption that bloggers reinforce their own prejudices rather than “expand their horizons”.
Many bloggers blog to open up conversations to do exactly that, expand their own horizons. I don’t really want to go into depth and explain what drives me to blog, but a huge part of it is to share what I find interesting in the hope that others can “expand their horizons” by reading my content. So, major aspersion on your part Sandy.
The notion that the vast amount of “amateur” content is “swamping vital and interesting information” is a very interesting one to explore. On the surface I tend to agree. Although, the more I think about it, the cream always rises to the top and good content will find its way to me, regardless of whether it’s from an amateur or professional source.
Given a choice to live in a world where I only had access to what was deemed “professional” work or one where I had to wade through masses of amateur rubbish to find an amateur gem (as well as professional gems), I would take the latter any day, and it would seem that the vast majority of the populous would agree.
Sandy Grant: My final note on this subject is that, although it’s interesting to explore the notion of dilution of relevant and “vita” information, none of this really has relevance to Creative Commons licensing.
So I guess, as I said, just don’t believe all the patchouli-scented info hippies, check out the ACC advice and see if this sort of licence really does work for you. And just to quote quickly from the conclusion of that advice, ‘Creative Commons licences essentially strip copyright of all meaning, and they’re not generally likely to be of much benefit to professional creators.’
The ACC information sheet on Creative Commons licensing can be found here.
Sandy is absolutely right, you should be informed when making decisions around protecting (or freeing) your work. Clearly, in Cory’s case (as is the case with many others), giving away his novels has worked to his advantage. CC is all about choice and your freedom to do with your work whatever you wish. At its core, CC is all about giving you the ability to signal your intentions up front and your intentions might not always be to protect and sell as much product as you can. Remember the beautiful “Our Lives Change” story?
Sandy Grant: The Creative Commons obviously does have some real momentum, and something of a cult following
I love Cory’s great retort “160 million works of them licensed under Creative Commons and there are projects under way in 81 countries, if that’s a cult, I don’t know what a religion is”.
-dg
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