The Creative Commons project is a great one that will be a real benefit for intellectuals and all types of creative culture workers. However, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that such licensing on our part will manage, by itself, to relax Disney’s death grip on the world’s mind. We also will have to work toward violent overthrow of the Mouse.

This is a little thought experiment I often throw out for consideration. I’ve had dreams with trademarked and copyright-controlled material in them. I’ve had dreams with characters from videogmaes, sitcoms, film, literature, comic books etc. – all the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture washes up on the shores of my subconscious.

And I can’t document them, visually. I cannot produce and distribute a film of my own dreams without running into serious legal difficulties.

When the main character in Wim Wenders’ “Kings of the Road” said, “The Americans have colonized our subconscious,” I don’t think he realized how literally true that statement would become.

Mind you, I’ve still not quite done it yet myself. I know how easy it is – but I can’t make up my mind which licence I want. So instead of spend 20 minutes working it out I’m unlicenced.

I get confused, too, because copyright legislation is different in the US, in the EU and in Norway and though I at times have tried hard to understand it all, once even going so far as to walk all the way over to the law faculty bookshop and BUYING a 500 page book on digital copyright in Norway (I think I must have read some of it), I don’t understand it. I read the first fifty pages or so of Lessig, and he writes so it makes sense (it was entertaining, even, I only stopped because I went on holiday and it was a hardback too heavy to carry), but then trying to figure out all the European acronyms that cropped up on the web (DCwhatever?), and how that makes any difference, and how you relate Lessig’s arguments about copyright being in breach of the intentions of the American constitution to what I think I should be able to do in Norway just gets absolutely byzantine and so each time I try I give up.

I did buy a zone-free DVD-player though. They’re not allowed to sell them zone-free, here (anywhere?) but they’re allowed to sell them with a little bit of paper that has the cheat codes that tell you how to set it to zone zero. Which will play anything.

I totally gave up on trying to understand the legal details of that.

I think that the legal details are intentionally byzantine and confusing, Jill. The main point of Lessig’s book is, essentially, that these systems of control are being put into place, baldly serving no one but powerful lobbies, and that “we the people” are doing nothing about it. I do know that some things are slightly better in the EU, or at least that there’s a bit more visible resistance, but I think William’s also correct that there’s some colonizing going on.

There are some promising signs though — open source software is thriving (even if the WIPO finds it offensive) and I heard on the radio this morning that Universal, one of the big recording industry giants, is slashing prices on CDs in an attempt to woo back filesharers. It’s a kind of acknowledgement that the rejection of recording industry practices wasn’t just a matter of a few n’eer do well pirates, but one that is widespread among consumers.

Greg Dyke, creative director of the BBC:

“Just imagine your child comes home from school with homework to make a presentation to the class on lions, or dinosaurs, or Argentina or on the industrial revolution.

“He or she goes to the nearest broadband connection – in the library, the school or even at home – and logs onto the BBC library.

“They search for real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation.

“They download them and, hey presto, they are able to use the BBC material in their presentation for free.

“Now that is a dream which we will soon be able to turn into reality.

“We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

“Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

“We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive.

“When complete, the BBC will have taken a massive step forward in opening our content to all – be they young or old, rich or poor.

“But then it’s not really our content – the people of Britain have paid for it and our role should be to help them use it.”

This also:

“I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.

“In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone’s lives.”

Those of you interested in Creative Commons might also enjoy reading about copyleft, a similar concept, which dates back to 1983, according to the timeline of information sharing.

I suppose that’s already how the world works though, isn’t it. Norwegians happen to have oil, parental leave, free health care (I’m not mentioning the queues) and free tuition and they obviously try to stop people from other countries from gaining access to these goods, services and benefits.

The difference is just that now we might be going to start doing the same with information. And of course, with digital copies, information doesn’t HAVE to be scarce in the way that goods and services generally are.

It’s still far better than locking all the information up, completely.

There’s a lot of room for debate about the remedy (or remedies) — for instance, I think that the copyright solution Lessig proposes in his book — a five year renewable term of copyright, requiring registration and a nominal fee for each renewal, is too extreme, and would be a pain in the ass for writers (can you imagine registering each and every blog post?). I like the fact that my work is automatically copyrighted and that I don’t need to fill out a form to make it so. But I’d be happy for that protection to last twenty years and no longer. My feeling is that some rights do need to be retained by the authors of a work, but only for the reasons that Jefferson and the boys intended — in order to make writing and creating viable professions that encourage and further progress. The problem is that in our contemporary capitalist society, we’ve confused progress with the acquisition and protection of property. Even post-cold-war, the US mentality seems to be property good, anything that has a whiff of socialism bad. This is the same reason why Jill gets free tuition and healthcare while a lot of my friends are up to their neck in student loan debt and look both ways about four times before crossing the street. In the US, property has been elevated to the point that it has obfuscated the idea of the “general good.”

I like CC licenses better than copylefting because authors can retain some IP rights while picking and choosing those that they give over to the public. Copylefting/GNU licenses work great for software, and perhaps for things like image archives, sound archives, different kinds of “materials” databases. It might not work so well for novels.

Compulsory royalties is garbage. I’ve asked every computer programmer I know if they would work knowing their only compensation was to submit a claim to a tribunal once a year and wait three years to see what piece of the royalty pool was theirs. They all just laughed and said, “what, are you kidding? That’s what we want YOU to do!” But somehow Lessig thinks musicians, authors and filmakers will be happy to spend tens of millions creating their products, allowing them to be endlessly copied and distributed over the internet and then earn their living by filing annual claims with a royalty tribunal. And all those companies that claim a compulsory license – like they’re all going to just line up and pay on time and account fairly to something over fifty thousand creators? They don’t do it now and they have the threat of major corporations going against them – you think they’re going to do it for me? You think Fox is going to put up $150mm to make Spiderman 2 hoping the royalty tribunal will give them back their investment – why doesn’t Microsoft make its product public domain instead. This is one of those ideas that sounds so logical and sensible that it seems no-brainer until someone tells you that its YOUR job that is going to be paid this way instead of mine.

You say they “don’t get it” – so we should steal your stuff! “You didn’t react fast enough!” – so we should be able to steal your stuff! “Your services are poor substitutes for Napster” – so we should steal your stuff! “There aren’t enough songs on your service” – so we should steal your stuff! “I want to copy them on more devices” – so we should steal your stuff! “You make too much money” – so we should steal your stuff! “You screw the artists (buying that hoakum lock stock and PR machine)” – so we should steal your stuff.

So an industry that employs millions of people and has created one of the greatest cultural and business models the world has ever known is now subjected to death by techno-babble. Why? For no better reason than THEY CAN! Free music is just sampling and actually grows record sales – my God you would believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Sadaam Hussein ordered the planes into New York. 35% drop in unit sales, over 500 bands released by their labels, thousands of layoffs and now the companies are giving up and merging what’s left.

Congratulations idiots – but I guess it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t YOUR job downsized due to internet theft and Lessig’s convenient arguments to justify theft.

Lessig says the old tries to control the new – I say the new wants a free lunch and should step up and earn their way just like everyone else before them.

Don’t buy into this twaddle – it’s only about one thing – the tech industry doesn’t want to pay for the products it is exploiting. It’s really that simple.

The rest of the book – all the scarry stuff – is just Lessig’s fertile imagination watered by half a dozen or so anecdotes which he wants you to believe are just indicative of a huge wellspring of insane corporate behavior – but there is no fountain of litigation, there is no big brother, there is no corporation shooting itself in the foot by chasing stupid minor infractions because of a bizarre adherence to micro-managing copyright enforcement. Post Bart Simpson and Fox could sue you – but how many have they sued? Probably none, or one or two at most who probably tried to sell cartoons illegally. Last I checked every third web site was about The Matrix – zero lawsuits. Name any suits over this issue? Anyone? Anyone? Still looking…….

Technology moves fast – so we should be able to steal. Technology is cooler than writing songs – so we should be able to steal. Technology will defeat your efforts to earn a living – so we should be able to steal and you should find a new job.

And somehow, somewhere the mysterious fairy of goodwill and generosity is going to magically compensate songwriters, authors, composers, performers, the grips on the set, the musicians on the session, the printers, booksellers, video stores and theater ushers. Why? Because in the land of Silicon make-believe they can simulate logic and make you believe it just like they made you buy a Windows operating system.

Don’t.