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• Uvod.odt

-- IvicaPetrinic - 06 Jul 2006

Originalni tekst na engleskom

In recent years copyright has moved away from being an esoteric and technical legal subject to one that affects musicians, designers, artists, students, authors, ordinary consumers, and more generally any one involved in any way in cultural production. Copyright stories assault us everyday in our newspapers, our emails and in the next few years, will play a very important role in determining the way we think of creativity; either in terms of property or in terms of collaboration. It is an issue in which content creators have a vital stake and certainly too important an issue to leave to the lawyers alone.

This booklet serves as an introduction to the world of "open content licensing", a paradigm that is rapidly emerging as an important alternative to the existing model of copyright.

The world of open content licensing (which we shall consider in detail as we go along) has great benefits for a large number of people. You could for instance be:

• The creator of a website who wants it to be available indefinitely as a free, public resource.

You would like to allow anyone to mirror your site or use its content for other projects without needing to obtain permission. After the creator's death mirroring or continuing the site should not be illegal for 70 years just because of standard copyright regulations.

• A musician or part of a band that wants to make your music available to a larger audience, and you decide that making it available online would be a good idea. But yet you may want to ensure that no one makes any commercial use of your music without your permission.
• A part-time photographer or designer who has no problem with any person using your work or sharing it with others as long as they acknowledge your authorship and give you proper credit for it whenever they use your work.
• A documentary or experimental filmmaker willing to share your footage with others, and allowing them to use portions while making their films.
• Someone looking at using existing images, music, videos etc and mixing them with other content to create a remix or a new version, but who cannot afford to pay the high royalty or be someone interested in having people from other backgrounds use your work, or incorporate it into theirs.
• An artist whose work fundamentally depends on the ability to use existing material to create parodies, spoofs or subversions.
• A designer looking at collaborating with either another designer or just someone from a completely different discipline, by using or incorporating their work.
• A teacher interested in making your course syllabus available for others to use, so that they comment, add, critique it, or even work collaboratively with you to create an improvement on the course.
• A scholar, critic or essayist who wants his writing to be publicly accessible, to schools, libraries and the general public instead of signing over copyrights to academic journal and book publishers who normally do not pay their authors, but make public institutions pay a lot of money for these publications.
• A playwright interested in writing an experimental play through an online collaboration model and interested in ensuring that the play is available for everyone to use, but also concerned that any person who creates a version of your play should also allow others the same freedom of modifying or adapting this play that they have written.
• Or just someone in the world of cultural production who is sick of the dominant system of copyright and wants to explore other options.

But hey, what is wrong with the world of copyright anyway, and why should we even begin to start thinking in terms of alternatives to it? After all isn't copyright a system that exists primarily to protect creators and provide them with an incentive to produce?

While an initial purpose of copyright may have been to provide an incentive for creators, it is important not to be taken in completely by this mythical claim made by copyright. Consider for instance the following:

• Most creators/ authors are rarely the owners of their own copyright. It usually gets transferred to either the recording company, the publisher, or the person commissioning a work of art etc. Even in countries where copyright may, by law, be non-transferable, most publishers effectively circumvent this regulation by requiring the author to sign a contract which grants the publisher exclusive distribution rights.
• Musicians often make most of their money from live performances rather than from royalties from sales of their records. They sell "services", as do many programmers and designers.
• And of course, monetary incentive is rarely the only reason for a person to be in cultural production. Besides, an open content model does not preclude you from making money off your work.

Copyright began as a system of balances to provide incentives to creators while also ensuring that there was a free circulation of works in the public domain, which all other creators could build upon. For example, copyright explicitly allowed (and still allows) public libraries to exist as an alternative, non-commercial distribution channel for cultural works. Over time, this balance has shifted drastically in favour of content owners such as large publishing houses, media conglomerates etc. In fact copyright is often used as a tool to prevent or curb creativity and the move away from copyright is an important one in that it seeks to refocus on the interest of the general public as well as artists and creators.