CoffeeBear.net

Dvorak vs. Creative Commons

Posted by Mark | Filed under Rants

In a recent opin­ion piece on PCMag.com, Mr. Dvo­rak shows off his stun­ning lack of com­pre­hen­sion of the ben­e­fits to Cre­ative Com­mons Licensing.

Will some­one explain to me the ben­e­fits of a trendy sys­tem devel­oped by Pro­fes­sor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford?

CCL is a sim­ple way for con­tent cre­ators to let every­body know what they’ll allow oth­ers to do with their work. There’s no lag time in track­ing down the con­tent creator/copyright holder/legal depart­ment and then phoning/emailing/snail-mailing them to find out if it would be okay to take their work and do X with it (what­ever X might be). This sim­plif­ca­tion of the process allow­ing oth­ers to remix exist­ing con­tent is a won­der­ful ben­e­fit to the pub­lic and con­tent cre­ators alike. Con­tent cre­ators can take any CC licensed mate­r­ial they like, mix it up into some­thing new and put it back out much more quickly with­out wor­ry­ing that they’re going to be sued for break­ing somebody’s copy­right. The pub­lic ben­e­fits because this allows a lot more con­tent to be cre­ated much more quickly.

A bit later in the arti­cle, Mr. Dvo­rak starts com­plain­ing about the optional com­mer­cial pro­vi­sions in the CCL scheme.

This means that oth­ers have cer­tain rights to reuse the mate­r­ial under a vari­ety of pro­vi­sos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for com­mer­cial pur­poses. Why not com­mer­cial pur­poses? What dif­fer­ence does it make, if every­one is free and easy about this? In other words, a non­com­mer­cial site could dis­trib­ute a mil­lion copies of some­thing and that’s okay, but a small com­mer­cial site can­not deliver two copies if it’s for com­mer­cial pur­poses. What is this telling me?

Pro­vided that the con­tent cre­ator tagged the con­tent as hav­ing the Non-Commercial pro­vi­sion in a CC license; then it’s telling you that cre­ator does not want to use their work in a com­mer­cial fasion. How hard is that to com­pre­hend? The sad part is you almost picked up on a key rea­son peo­ple use CC licenses but you had to go at it back­wards. Yes, a non­com­mer­cial site could dis­trib­ute a mil­lion copies (of an appro­pri­ately licensed work) for free and that’s a great thing; artic­u­larly for the non-mainstream, unknown con­tent cre­ator who just wants to get their work out in the pub­lic eye.

Then Mr. Dvo­rak comes up with this bit of nonsense:

This is non­sense. Before Cre­ative Com­mons I could always ask to reuse or mir­ror some­thing. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for com­mer­cial or non­com­mer­cial pur­poses. It’s called fair use. I can still do that, but Cre­ative Com­mons seems to hint that with its license means that I can­not. At least not if I’m a com­mer­cial site and the non­com­mer­cial pro­viso is in effect. This is a bogus sug­ges­tion, because Cre­ative Com­mons does not super­sede the copy­right laws.

If he had done even a mod­icum of research on the Cre­ative Com­mons web­site; he would have found their page detail­ing the Base­line Rights included in ALL CC licenses. The only thing “bogus” about this sug­ges­tion is Mr. Dvorak’s claim that it’s the Cre­ative Com­mons folk who are mak­ing it. A Cre­ative Com­mons license doesn’t say you can­not have any fair use rights; it sim­ply says “Hey friend, here’s some stuff for you to play with, so long as you’re will­ing to play by the rules.” And then it gives you a con­ve­nient link to check out what those rules are. Along those lines, Mr. Dvo­rak com­plained that the Cre­ative Com­mons folk could sue some­body and ruin what lit­tle fair use rights remain to the pub­lic and again a quick look through the Cre­ative Com­mons web­site puts paid to that bit of nonsense.

For his next delu­sion, Mr. Dvo­rak decides the Cre­ative Com­mons folks are some­how cor­rupt­ing Pub­lic Domain. I would have thought hav­ing a clear & con­cise doc­u­ment spec­i­fy­ing that a work has been ded­i­cated to the pub­lic domain is a good thing. *shrug* Maybe that’s why I’m a no-name blog­ger and not an edi­tor at PC Magazine.

There are sev­eral more exam­ples pep­pered through­out the remain­der of Mr. Dvorak’s arti­cle. All of these exam­ples could have been cleared up if he’d both­ered to do a bit of look­ing around the Cre­ative Com­mons web­site, but prob­a­bly the most basic bit of guff that he writes is in the last para­graph of the article.

And it seems to actu­ally weaken the copy­rights you have com­ing to you with­out Cre­ative Commons.

With this one sen­tence, we can see Mr. Dvo­rak appears to actu­ally under­stand what a Cre­ative Com­mons license does¹. I would sup­pose since he has the basic idea that he does not agree with the con­cept behind Cre­ative Com­mons and so wrote this rather inflam­a­tory arti­cle. It seems to me Mr. Dvo­rak is suf­fer­ing from RIAA syn­drome. That is to say, he’s an estab­lished con­tent cre­ator who just does not under­stand –and doesn’t want to under­stand– the evolv­ing land­scape of the busi­ness environment.

¹ A CC license removes the spe­cific restric­tions on the use of your con­tent that you decide do not need to be on the con­tent. One could con­sider this an inten­tional weak­en­ing of the copyright.

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