Last week we discussed the increasing popularity in “citizens” producing journalism, filmmaking, and game development. This week is an in-depth case study of some of the problems caused by this shift from large industries as main producers to “citizens” producing for themselves. The centre of the issue revolves around copyright laws and the struggle between protection of individual property, promoting creativity and innovation, and increasing the public’s knowledge and resources. Copyrighting originally reserved all rights of the creation to the original creator. Through Creative Commons Licensing agreements some of those rights can be waved, allowing the product, whether it is a song, invention, or idea, to be more easily accessible to the public.
Creative Commons Licensing allows creators to give certain freedoms to the general public regarding their property in combinations of four categories: attribution, derivatives, commercial use, and share alike (Seneviratne et al., 2009). Attribution means that someone using the material must give credit to the original creator. Derivatives allows users to change or distort the product is some way to create a new product. The commercial aspect of the agreement deals with allowing people to use the product for commercial gain. Creative Commons Licensing agreements can choose to allow or not allow derivatives and/or commercial use of their products. The final category is “share alike” and allows creators to say that for someone to use their product it has to meet the standards of the original. Under a share alike agreement no derivatives are allowed and the replica must match to quality of the original.
Copyright laws used to be easier to monitor when large corporations were the main producers and production costs were very high, but with digitization, and the ease with which “citizens” can copy and use material for their own productions copyright laws are getting harder and harder to monitor and maintain. Seneviratne et al. (2009) discuss the difficulties with protecting the rights of people that put photographs up on the internet, and the struggles with detecting copyright infringements online. With the ease of downloading and sharing songs in digital form, the music industry has had particular difficulty in dealing with copyright infringements. Creative Commons Licensing is trying to help copyright laws by restoring a balance between individual’s property and public’s resources.
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| Figure 1 http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Blink-182 |
As Tehranian (2007) says in his research paper for the University of Utah, “with the tools for creation, manipulation, and widespread dissemination of copyrighted work in the hands of an ever-increasing number of individuals... copyright has infiltrated public consciousness” (p. 540). This has become most apparent in the music industry, where even television shows, such as South Park (Figure 1), have created episodes on the subject. While some loss of revenue from declining record sales has been an issue, artists are also concerned with others using their songs in new works.
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| Figure 2 http://angeladuncan.wordpress.com/2008/06/ |
Remixes and “mash-ups” have become increasingly popular with the rise in popularity of artists such as Girl Talk (Figure 2) and Super Mash Bros. This style of music does not require the artist to create any original music using instruments, but rather they mix together parts of other songs to create their own. This is much easier and cheaper from a production stand point and has inspired a very tech savvy generation to try it themselves. Many amateur “mash-ups” can be found all over the internet, and while professionals such as Girl Talk pay for the rights to use the songs they mix together, amateurs typically do not. This is where many copyright infringements occur, and where Creative Commons can be the most help.
Amateurs are typically not trying to sell their “mash-ups”, but instead are trying to show off their technical skills. With Creative Commons Licensing artists can require attribution, so amateurs can use it as long as they give credit to the original, and set a no commercial clause to it, so that professionals that want to use it to sell still have to pay for it. Artists are already having to adapt to the downloading era in music, some have set up websites where people can download the music and name their own price anywhere from nothing to 99 dollars (Evans, 2010). According to Evans (2010), this helps reduce the need for illegal piracy, and while most people download it for free, they spread the word around, getting more people to download and some people do donate. Artists can use Creative Commons Licensing in the same way. By only reserving some rights, instead of all, they can allow amateurs to spread their work around increasing their popularity.
References
Evans, K. (2010). Music’s new entrepreneurs. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/25/smashing-pumpkins-radiohead-drake-business-music-indie-entrepreneurs.html
Seneviratne, O., Kagal, L., Weitzner, D., Abelson, H., Berners-Lee, T., & Shadbolt, N. (2009). Detecting creative commons license violations on images on the world wide web. WWW2009. Retrieved from http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2008/Papers/WWW2009/paper.pdf
Tehranian, J. (2007). Infringement nation: copyright reform and the law/norm gap. University of Utah, S. J. Quinney College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper Series. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1029151
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