p2pnet - rss feed: Creative Commons paradox
p2pnet.net Opinion:- Creative Commons is being hailed as an option to the current copyright crisis on the internet.
With a spectrum of possibilities between full copyright, all rights reserved, and the public domain - no rights reserved - it offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists.
But there’s an important question: Will it work?
Kudos
Creative Commons has a pretty good website and is a wonderful testament of legal knowledge management.
It combines good interface and functionality with a stable legal base, accessible to all.
The basic idea behind Creative Commons is: offer a simple and flexible system, built within current copyright law. It allows creators to write their own licenses to share works such as music, movies, images, and text online with others.
In essence, it’s Digital Rights Management with a lawyerly twist.
Critique
Lawrence Lessig, a passionate supporter of Creative Commons, proposed in his book ("Free Culture") to fire lots of lawyers.
The attempt to exclude lawyers from the copyright battleground by presenting alternative licensing models is a paradox. Furthermore, the major problem with Creative Commons is: Enforcement.
Solution
How do I force someone to comply with any agreement I put in front of them? The answer: with lots of lawyers!!
As I’ve said before, solutions by legal experts are intrinsically handicapped by a box of rules and codes.
While Creative Commons fits nicely inside this box, it will ultimately conflict with an infinite Internet.
Raymond Blijd - fk2w
January 17th, 2005 at 4:21 am
There is no paradox here. Lawyers are needed to write good licenses which everyone will understand, and are then needed when someone deliberately violates these licenses. Having convoluted licenses that create uncertainty and needing lawyers to be involved in every stage of creativity is a type of wasteful friction that is harmful to the economy.
This is like the paradox that some software authors I know use to suggest that my support of Free/Libre Software is inappropriate. Their claim is that if all software were more reliable and it just “did its job” then this would put software authors and computer support companies out of business. In their mind buggy software is a “public good” which feeds the economy.
Lawyers and software authors are in quite related fields: they help shape the rules that govern our lives, with the rules either being executed in a court or in a computer.
http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/code-is-law-speedgeek.html
I would hope most people recognize that our society has far more important things to be doing than spending all our time rebooting our computer while defending ourselves in court.
Russell McOrmond