Topic: Looking Back
Topic Type: Event
Looking back over the one year life of this project.
This a draft. I wanted to work on it out in the open, but please don't take this for a finished article.
my mind wanders...
What is going on?
What I did and why?
Get to the point?
What did I learn from each person I talked to?
What is my conclusion?
The first thing I wanted to know, was how did the Creative Commons form in New Zealand. How is it currently organized.
We are at the beginning of a technological revolution. It is a revolution centuries in the making, but we are in the infancy of the digital age. Innovation in digital technology has changed the way we live our daily lives, and the way we communicate. We all know this, but the world in general is still coming to terms with our new electronical environment.
Revolution is nothing new. The world changes, there are people who try to exploit old models for as long as possible, and then there are people who embrace change. The way I consume the product of human creativity has changed. The way it is delivered to me, the way I discover it, has changed. For the better? That is not the question that concerns me. How can I improve the situtaion I find myself in now? This question I find more releveant.
Which ultimately brings us to the question: What is the current situation?
This is what I tried to find out in the past year. How could I find this out? Over the past few years there is one word that bubbled to the top of my mind. Copyright. What is going on with copyright?
Why are some people using a creative contracts to side step rules imposed on us by a system we, regular people who procude and consume creative products on a daily basis,
We consume and create creative products on a daily basis. There are millions of us who engage in this modern way of life, armed with our own personal arsenel of digital publishing tools.
I save this article on my personal virtual server, housed in a environment controled datacenter 8000 miles from the workstation where I type. I store my research, raw audio files, images, document files and back them up to a local filesever, which is in turn backed up to an external drive for eventual remote/offsite storage. I have a laptop, netbook, cellphone, digital camera and recording equipment. I have the ability to record and accumulate information and publish it. So why not?
So what do I want to know about and how do I go about learning more, and using the tools at my disposal to record and transmit this information.
What is going on? If you were in New Zealand in late 2008/2009 and you were thinking about copyright, you would be familiar with something called "Section 92A".
Copyright is Broken.
How is coyright broken?
Copyright is a time limited monopoly to give a creator control over how their work is published.
This is an incentive for the author to create new works. Most people misunderstand, that it is not the protection from other people copying your work that is the incentive. The incentive that that time period is limited, and that to benefit from your creativity, you must continue to contribute to the pool of creative resources, which we all draw upon, and that your prior works are about to enter.
An effective monopoly does not have incentive to produce new work, or innovate. The monopoly benefits from stopping others from doing things. It's this stopping, or censorship of ideas, that is harmful. If you look at specific cases, this becomes difficult to digest. J.D. Saligner, preventing someone from creating a sequel to Catcher In The Rye. Most people agree the third party sequel, was not very good. I thought Catcher was boring enuough, when I struggled through it as teen, I have no desire to read a poorly written sequel. I am curious to reread Catcher now that it's been 20 years since first having opened the book. I fail to see how the publishing of the sequel, the fact of it's existence, affects the original work. Accept for acknowledging that the original work was important, and worthy of derivations.
The work creators produce is a public good and once it's published it can not be taken back.
It becomes part of the economy of ideas, all creators have the right to draw upon and produce new works.
My Conclusion before thinking about it very much, just because mainly I felt like writing this.
The Creative Commons suite of copyright licenses are creative contracts. I recognized the need for this type of contract, many years before I could express the idea. The seeds have been planted in digital copying going back decades. Surely the copyright license over software, the stuff that makes the digital world go, has influnences how we should be controling the cargo of our electronic distribution tools.
Which pushes me to the center, and we look at the creative world on a spectrum from resources which are tightly controled on one side all the way over to goods that are in the public domain and available for anyone to utilize free of restriction.
Creating tools to help distiguish, and mainly to prevent attacks from "rights" holders are a logical step. Circumvent rights and infringement claims, a proactive step.
Ultimate goal is to diffuse the copyright bomb. Better defining different kinds of infrigement and reducing or removing penalites that can be claimed for non-commercial use.
