Cory Doctorow Says DIY Licensing Will Solve Piracy 189
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.'"
Pirates don't pay (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't get it (Score:1, Interesting)
First of all - what gross income? The pirates just upload their work to torrent sites. (Or, um, so I'm told...)
Second, why would someone who ignores the current "don't copy this at all" licensing have any more respect for Doctorow's proposed license?
Re:Pirates don't pay (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, because now you've moved from the Copyright law category to the Contract law category, which is by and far less compromized and much easier to enforce/more difficult to abuse.
I really hope this takes off (Score:5, Interesting)
What you are forgetting is that this is aimed to people who do want to paint the license, but can't. There are "pirates" who will just profit from another person's works, and there always will be. The idea is that you shouldn't be forced to be one of them.
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? The cost to get a license agreement with just one of the biggies would be enough to put me out of business. And their terms weren't suited to me as well. They wanted a huge upfront payment followed by a small per-unit cost.
So, as a law-abiding citizen, I just went out of business? Of course not, I just didn't contact them and hoped that they wouldn't contact me.
The terms that Doctorow proposes would suit my purpose just fine. And I would pay.
Also, I don't think the big distributors would be against it. The distribution terms he proposes aren't advantageous to a big distributor. It wouldn't be fostering competition. And I doubt that the shop from around the corner can damage them.
Hollywood accounting (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't even work in licensing with proper commercial corporations like the record labels and film studios. It will fall foul of "Hollywood Accounting" [wikipedia.org]. Normally this is applied to rip off artists who are promised a percentage of profits (they find the company they've dealt with has made no profits, they've all been moved into a different company). This is slightly harder with gross revenue, but not much.
Re:Paying pirates (Score:4, Interesting)
When he says pirates, he means people out to make money using material they have no rights to reproduce otherwise. People who download and share things freely are completely without obligation.
Piracy in the media form is a myth. Piracy in taking a ship and killing the people and stealing the cargo is piracy.
What is at issue here? Content? No. The content is available in many, many forms. From free over the air to renting the property for a period of time.
The content sucks. Not a value judgement on the quality of the programming, but a technical one. I've got about $3,000 invested in a TV and a blu-ray player, and I feel ripped off. I can't find 1080p content. Most movies I get from netflix use about 1/2 of the height of my 16x9 screen. I had to abandon cable because the quality was so poor. Actually, DVDs or free downloads of rips from DVDs are about the sweet spot for price/quality.
Until the people can figure out a way of distribution and quality content, I don't think lawsuits are a viable business model.
Last night, I watched a music DVD and it had pictures of the band's _album covers_. They were actually still worth looking at. That ended in the mid 80s with the advent of the CD. I have boxes and closets full of CDs that I've been giving away to people over the years because its not worth my time to hunt for them (they are all on harddisks now).
Bah, yet another /. article on this crap. I guess it won't change until it changes.
Re:Paying pirates (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, all he's advocating is the old state of things. The casual swappers
shouldn't be prosecuted, persecuted and litigated. The side effects of trying
to squash all the little ants ends up creating more collateral damage than it's
worth. It's far better to apply the old intent of the laws and the original
pirate ethos.
There was always a distinction made between those that just passed stuff
around and those that tried to profit from it financially.
The big problem of course, as others have said, is the fact that it is
big media that has driven the recent changes in the other direction.
They're the ones that want to make copyright perpetual and turn
criminalize everyone. They will never go for this.