Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy

An anonymous reader writes "The founding editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: get a Creative Commons license and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it-yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.'"

CCPlus

[tepples]

AFAIK what he's suggesting is already within the scope of the CC license.

It's been floated before, under the name CCPlus [creativecommons.org]. See also Slashdot's coverage of CCPlus [slashdot.org].

Re:I like Cory but that isn't going to work

[PhilHibbs]

He isn't trying to stop car-boot pirates, the only place he mentions pirates is a throwaway line at the end "cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners". He's talking about people who want to use your material but not to just rip you off. Maybe "would turn the people who yesterday had no choice other than to be pirates into tomorrow's partners" would have been clearer, but less snappy.

Re:Why not lower costs?

[BiggerIsBetter]

One could argue that James Bond jumped the shark, but in adjusted dollars "Dr. No" got about as much income as "Casino Royale", yet cost 1/16th as much adjusted for inflation. People are still paying as much to see James Bond today as they paid in 1962.

Actually, people are paying about 3 times more to see James Bond today than they did in 1962.

Ref: http://www.bbhq.com/prices.htm [bbhq.com]

Re:Why not lower costs?

[mangu]

Using the inflation-adjusted figures you provided, we can see that while the industry made $59 million in profits from Dr. No, they made $500 million in profits from Casino Royale

Perhaps I didn't make myself quite clear. "Dr. No" made $60 million in 1962 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, "Dr. No" cost $8.4 million and got $420 million in profits, "Casino Royale" cost $140 million and got $500 million in profits.

Go to any industry executive and ask, is it better to get $420 milion in profits from a $8.4 million investment, or is it better to get $500 million in profits from a $140 million investment?

Re:Paying pirates

[eugene2k]

Actually, from what I've read, Corey doesn't claim that it will solve the piracy problem. He tries to tackle the problem of individuals creating derivative works without hiring lawyers to negotiate a license. For example if some person remixes a song, they either have to negotiate a deal with the record company and pay them royalties (and this involves hiring a lawyer to negotiate), or do it without hiring a lawyer, and thus be called a pirate. The latter is what Corey tries to address.

Re:Paying pirates

[drinkypoo]

Little publishers might give it a go but the distribution won't be there and neither will the marketing muscle of the big establishment.

Sublime got their first commercial album exposure through IUMA... but whatever.

Also, I am too lazy to go look it up, but bands without album sales have got songs into the top ten since the rules were changed to permit it... perhaps that was a UK story? So your complaints about distribution and advertising are just battered customer syndrome. Neither artists nor listeners need major labels. Or, in fact, labels.

Re:Why not lower costs?

[91degrees]

Dr No is probably a bad example. They had no idea whether it was going to be a success. Contemporary films To Kill a Mockingbird and Lawrence of Arabia had 2 times and 15 times the budget respectively.

Re:I really hope this takes off

[drinkypoo]

Take my case for example. I ran a small t-shirt store, whose drawings included, but were not limited to, characters of famous and not-so-famous movies, who were definitely copyrighted and/or trademarked. I did make money off them, and never paid the creators a dime. Why?

Because you were not sufficiently creative to produce original designs for which people would pay, and felt entitled to profit from the work of others? Many of us would have no problem with you wearing the shirts, but selling them is pretty much indefensible. I wonder if Copyright shouldn't be extended indefinitely, but with derivative works permitted and protected immediately so that anyone is free to reinvent anything any time, but nobody is free to reproduce anything without permission ever. It would promote similar, competing works... But still prevent people from gaining from the labor of others. They would have to do something.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:BRILLIANT IDEA

[Futile Rhetoric]

YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR.

Re:Paying pirates

[DerekLyons]

Piracy in the media form is a myth.

Nice try - but the term 'piracy' has been associated with 'media' for nearly two centuries.

Re:Why not lower costs?

[shark72]

With regard to salaries, then vs. now:

Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1MM to perform in Cleopatra. That's about $7MM in 2009 dollars. Very, very few female celebrities make more than $7MM per picture today.

The film grossed $43MM, which is about $300MM today.

Relative hyper-commercialization and hyper-glamorization is an exercise left to the reader. Sure, celebrities didn't have Twitter accounts in the 1960s and (with a few exceptions) didn't show up in naked photos. Yet the star-making machine was in full force, and young people were just as rabidly crazy about their favorite musicians and flim performers as they are today.

Re:BRILLIANT IDEA

[meta-monkey]

I'm a photographer [k-gallery.com] and sometimes put together slideshows of my work set to music, and while royalty-free music tends to be crap, ASCAP and BMI won't even talk to me for less than $6,000, which is a little excessive for one-time use for a client's wedding slideshow on my blog.

I wish the recording industry could do for commercial rights to music what iTunes did for digital downloads. Make it simple, charge a reasonable fee for a sync license, and small business will buy it. But when every use of a song requires lawyers to negotiate a contract, and when the fees they want are completely out of proportion with any gross the user might expect...who wins here? The song doesn't get used and the artist and the label don't get any money.

Re:BRILLIANT IDEA

[Ihmhi]

The artist doesn't really get much in the way of money anyway.

Jamendo

[Siker]

Check out Jamendo [jamendo.com] for cheap to license music which is actually pretty good.

Re:Paying pirates

[drinkypoo]

Sublime already had a huge following in CA by the time IUMA was launched.

I said first commercial album exposure. Weasel words? Maybe. But I said them before you made your comment.

Additionally, MP3s were essentially nonexistent before 1996 (when Brad Nowell died), and uncompressed music could fill an entire hard drive in those days.

Because I used to use IUMA back then and in fact spent a day whacking files for them (could have done it in moments if I knew then what I know now about scripting... but anyway) I know that they used mp2 audio back then, and had player download links on their page. IIRC they also had some u-Law samples, but that might not be right. So the lack of mp3 and the size of uncompressed audio is quite irrelevant.

Anyway, I found a citation [cnet.com]:

Patterson noted that industry executives already turn to IUMA as a source for new talent.

"Some of the labels--Geffen, for example--tell their people to come to our site regularly to find new talent," he said, adding that popular bands the Mermen and Sublime started on IUMA in 1994.

It got Sublime the exposure to the label that they needed to turn it into financial success. Too bad that wasn't good for the band... but that's a separate issue.