I am thinking that the first step might be to go through all the mailing lists to work out what the most popular questions are. It may be worth having some kind of meeting to discuss how to present the Q&A and how to answer each question. I though word press might be a good external site to gather the information. If anyone has a better idea, please list it.
July 20, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Conversation between Jamison Young and Johnathon Blake
What is the best interest of the artist in the current situation ?
The best interest depends upon:
* Where the artist wants to end up;
* If they are a performer, or a recorder;
* What medium they use;
Jamison-I struggle with some of the issues and CC is something relatively new for me.
Jonathon-Most people struggle with the Creative Commons licences.
The ramifications of each licence are very non-obvious.
Each licence has a different effect on different types of
artists. IE: Non-Commercial for authors works only for
distribution that is gratis. For musicians/vocalists, NC is
the only licence to use if one wants to paid by a collecting
society. For photography, NC accomplishes nothing. For
theatre, NC renders the material unusable by anybody.
I go thru the entire range of licences, showing how they do,
or don’t work for a specific form of artistic expression.
Jamison -Is a standard copyright without CC or APRA/AAMCOS best then ?
APRA/AAMCOS simply serves as a middleman, for collecting
royalty payments for your material.
For a broadcaster, or club owner, they provide a simple,
straightforward way of getting permission for performers
play their music.
For composers, arrangers, and lyricists, it provides a
simple, straightforward way to obtain royalty payments that
they might not otherwise obtain.
The big issue is always how accurate the disbursement of
royalty payments is. The less transparency there is, the
more likely the collecting society is to steal, mis-assign,
or lose royalty payments. The other issue is the formula
that is used to split up the money. Percentage based
formulas will result in “major” performers being overpaid,
and new/minor performers being underpaid.
Another major issue is how much control organized crime has
in running the collecting society. The less transparency for
all functions of the collecting society, the more likely it
is to be run by, and for organized crime.
July 22, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Richard Pfister from Brazil asked me some questions. This is the first one, Richard is doing a video project in Brazil.
In your experience, what are the advantages for artists to get with a Creative Commons license?
Advantages : Your art gets to more places without a price tag.
: Your art can be used/re-created by others in a positive way. “depends on the license you choose”
: Your able to create a license that suits your work.
-the license can also be taken down from your website when you choose.
-with a publisher your works become their property. You loose rights in return for an advance, yet often this advance is quite small considering artistic input.
-publishers might not publish your materials the way you want due to a conflict with other materials in catalog.
-do you want to be knocking on the doors of publishers. Is it art to do this ?
-Now you have found out about creative commons, do you want to stay with traditional forms of publishing ?
: Better ecology with the promotion of your art.
: Create better vibrations for you in more than one dimension.
-When people listen to your music it has a positive impact on you.
-Look at the lifestyle of extremely popular artists.
-The music business is more interested in the production around the art than the art.
-When people have your music they know that they have a legal right to the tunes.
-With CC you get a faster response as to how the culture sees your art.
Thoughts:
:What percentage of people not with CS are not with publishers, why do they stay ? Would they stay if they found out artists with CC are being heard ?
:With the conditions improving to create and distribute art due to the internet, software and computers, putting a price on your material makes no sense . A band in the 80’s could not consider having their art heard outside their immediate community without the publishing and recording business. Things have changed so the artist has to consider an adjustment, especially now that you have heard about creative commons.
:The music business has not been able to keep up with the changes in technology, the collection societies are a part of the business of music.
:As time goes on people are going to understand more and more how positive it is for art to be free.
:The more that the owners of copyright materials place restrictions on the use of copyright material the more popular cc materials shall be.
:I have had my art with Jamendo for a week, I got a 5 dollar donation.
:The cd’s/MP3’s that sell online do not reflect the artistic merit of the music. In most cases its a reflection on the artists/publisher/labels ability to market the product
:The cost of publishing your material is minimal with CC.
:The business around creative commons seem to be developing into services that don’t place restrictions on art. It seems that the public become the ones that decide what they like and what they don’t; isn’t this the way the artist always wanted it.
:Artists not with publishers using myspace are spending a lot of time networking. Is this art and what is impact of myspace on the self publisher ?
July 24, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
FAQs I’ve seen:
Can a BY-SA photograph be used to illustrate a non-BY-SA article?
(Yes. The article is not a derivative work.)
Can a CC-licenses article appear in a magazine alongside non-CC-licensed articles?
(Yes. This is a collective work not a derivative work. If the license is NC, the web site or magazine must satisfy the NC license.)
What does NC mean?
(See the NC FAQ at the CC site)
If I publish a CC-licensed MP3 of a song, am I licensing the score as well?
(Unknown.)
Can I combine GPL-licensed work with CC-licensed work?
(No. No CC license is compatible with the GPL, not even CC-BY).
July 24, 2007 at 8:29 pm
It might be good to put these on a wiki. It’s easy to collate and updat information using a wiki.
We could use Wikidot or ask CC if we can use their wiki. We can’t use Wikia, as they require content to be GNU FDL licensed, which would look strange for a CC FAQ.
July 24, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Hi Rob,
Thanks for this post
wiki sounds fine, its upto you how to set it up. I’m a novice when it comes to wiki. The creative commons site might be the best place to start.
are you on the free culture mailing list ?
other thoughts:
I was thinking that we should also ask Publishers for their input.
CC publishers/small publishers/large publishers
Maybe we can develop a list of questions to ask them that would allow to be licensed under CC.
Are any statistics around on the amount of self published works that generate an income through the CS ? What is the amount of published material that sells through Amazon as apposed self-published. good info from good sources is a positive for the site.
It would be good to have some solid stats.
I noticed this node on the icommons site
http://www.icommons.org/node_detail/free-culture-project-brazil-cultura-livre-brasil