SL CC Movie Workshop

Script for July 20, 2006 event

The Lives of CC’s Interns

Thanks for joining us for another CC SL event. As usual, we’ll be posting a transcript. Please let me know if you would like to be omitted from the talk. Also please try to be aware of side chatter getting into the public chat.

I’m going to let our 4 summer interns introduce themselves and lead this discussion. We have 2 legal interns, 1 free culture, and 1 tech all sharing our SF office. http://creativecommons.org/about/people#58

Introductions: Katy “Kavka” Frankel - I’m currently researching architecture and copyright and how the Developing Nations license may be an appropriate licensing strategy for architects who wish to implement their designs (and collaborate with others to develop new ones) in developing nations.

Amy “Blackflag” Rose - I am currently researching the Creative Commons sampling licenses and how they interact with current copyright law, specifically the fair use defense.

Margot “Kavka” Kaminski – I’ve been looking into the viability of Creative Commons licensing for professional authors (primarily nonacademic).

Asheesh "Paulproteus Pyle" Laroia - As a technology intern, my projects have been building a survey to help people better-understand the non-commercial licenses and a statistics engine to discover how the licenses are being used.

Katy: Architects are reluctant to engage in humanitarian design initiatives (for example, refugee housing and tsunami/Gulf Coast reconstruction), based partly on the fear of loosing their intellectual property. The Developing Nations license grants the freedoms to copy, distribute, display, make derivatives of and perform the work in nations not categorized as a “high income economy” according to the World Bank so long as attribution is paid to the original author creator.

Questions: 1) What do you, the SL community, see as the pros and cons to the Developing Nations license? 2) What kinds of challenges do you as creators face when trying contribute to sustainable development and can some rights reserved copyright be an effective mechanism to contributing to development? 3) What are other ways to incentivise creators to use their work in developing nations/disaster relief situations/sustainable development initiatives?

Amy: You might have heard about one of the most recent sampling cases, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films. In this case, the court held that if an artist admits to copying a sample from another artists work, or if the copying is evident, the sampling artist will be held liable for copyright infringement. They can’t claim that the sample was too small to be recognizable (called the de minimis defense) and they likely can’t claim that their sample is a fair use. The court summed up its position with this now infamous line, “get a license or do not sample.” Of course, it’s more complicated than that. It is often complicated and expensive to clear a sample. There is no compulsory licensing for samples, which would require artists to allow others to sample their work under specified terms. Hoping to combat these scary legal trends, the CC sampling licenses let artists and authors invite other people to use a part of their work and make it new.

1) The fair use defense to copyright infringement allows limited uses of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holder for scholarship, criticism, and review. Do you think sampling should also be defensible as a fair use, or would another defense be appropriate? 2) If you are an artist, have recent copyrighted decisions affected the way you make or think about art? How have the CC sampling licenses affected your art? 3) Do you see any downsides to the sampling licenses?

Margot: This has entailed research into current and future publishing model and relevant legal cases. I will give a shortened sketch of what I've come up with and will then pose several of the questions that have repeatedly come up.

1.) Do you currently read print publications? Or do you get your information online?
 2.) Are your purchasing and reading habits for fiction the same as your purchasing/reading

     habits for nonfiction?  If not, why?


3.) Would you purchase a book or article that is available online for free (honestly)?

      If so, for what reasons?


4.) Flip to the author's side, for a moment: why would you choose to tag your written work under a CC license?

Asheesh: The great thing about interning at CC is being able to use current technology in a Free Software-friendly environment. The work I do is hosted in a public Sourceforge repository (in the cctools project), licensed under the GPL. We welcome others to reuse the work we're putting in. It's also exciting that (soon!) the tools I'm building will be seen by the general public.

I'd be happy to answer technical questions about how I built these, what problems I've faced and solved, or more general suggestions or questions about other CC tech projects.

• If any of you are doing tech work, does your company release

 internal code as open source?  Why or why not?

Discussion outline:

• Mention nearly-problematic non-commercial incident in the past
• List some of Mia's questions for the NC draft
• Show a screenshot of the (draft!) front page of the survey
  • (I should clear that with Mia first.)

• Then I'll take questions about non-commercial use in the survey

• I'll show a few pie and bar charts generated by my license usage survey
• Explain that I created these by quering Google and Yahoo for linkbacks to our licenses.