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So Apple released this amazing new part of iLife, GarageBand. With it, you can make great music. (Well, I don't know about you, but I know Willem will make great music with it.) Anyway, one missing piece has been a simple way to know what content you're free to mix and remix within your GarageBand app. MacBand has now solved that problem. They've got a great archive of music by genre -- all marked with Creative Commons licenses.
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So Apple released this amazing new part of iLife, GarageBand. With it, you can make great music. ... one missing piece has been a simple way to know what content you’re free to mix and remix within your GarageBand app. MacBand has now solved that pro... [Read More]
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Lessig Blog by Lawrence Lessig is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Comments (9)
Lawrence, why do you think I am not free to choose whatever content I choose? And do you think anti-sodomy laws actually stop the practice or just punish those caught? Free speech doesn't occur because a law says its permissible. Free speech occurs in the absence of perceived retribution.
Few people care less about who "owns such and such piece of intellectual property" on the net because very few people get busted. We (the people using copyright material without permission) win while the industry loses because they don't receive revenue. Until law enforcement catches up, the average internet and computer users is not really interested in protecting artist rights.
You can't have silly licensing agreements, such as creative commons or copyright in the information age. Why can't you understand these artificial restrictions on parties who are willfully engaged in the activity is not viewed as immoral nor unethical, be those participating.
What you should try to understand is that information, unlike anything else known to humanity, can be reproduced infinitely at zero to marginal cost. Until you realise this, you not with the people but your part of the problem. Don't you think something exhibiting these characteristics should be shared according to free will?
Actually, the Founders who wrote the Constitution were well aware of the fact that ideas could be reproduced infinitely (even though the costs of reproducing ideas tended to be much higher back then). They ultimately chose to create a limited copyright monopoly to encourage people to create. The original copyright law seems like a reasonable balance to me.
The fact of the matter is that people can indeed make their own mixes of whatever they want and post them online. Go for it. Odds are that if you're not trying to make a buck off of it, nothing will happen to you.
Let's say you decide you do want to start making some money off of your remixed art. That's where you're likely to get sued.
The RIAA's current legal shenanigans are kinda silly and pointless, but I think copyright has its place and I appreciate Mr. Lessig's tenacity in trying to make copyright more functional and better balanced.
Kevin
"Few people care less about who “owns such and such piece of intellectual property” on the net because very few people get busted."
ABliss.....tell that to the people who have had to pay enormous fines for downloading pirated music and have been caught distributing it. I think what you fail to realize is that the efficiency that technology brings to copying and distributing content will (and is) empowering those who wish to control that content, based on such things as IP, copyright, and licensing.
Ideas like the Creative Commons is a good idea, and a good path to start walking down.
John, you can also say that some of those people became celebrities during the superbowl and wound up on an Apple iTunes commercial for their trouble. The girl's argument was "I didn't know it was illegal (wink, wink)." Unless her sister was the dumbest 17-year-old on the planet, I have a pretty good idea she knew what she was doing.
You can also visit sites like http://www.zeropaid.com
They know where they're coming from.
So often these days the debate abount intellectual property, copyright, and making money devolves into a shouting match about evil monolithic corporate control versus anarchy. Lessig's Creative Commons, as I understand it, has never tried to preclude the author of a work from asking for money or prohibiting others from using a shared work for commercial purposes. That so far it has tended to be used by people noncommercially is might be because it's been embraced by a lot of 'early adopters' and people who are in fact looking to make a political statement against corporate control, but I don't expect that to last forever.
I've talked to other IP professors who have decried the RIAA's actions and claimed that they should "educate, not sue." But the problem isn't education for a lot of the people who "share" content. They know they are swapping commercial products (not just songs, but programs, movies, and books) that they would otherwise have to pay for. They also realize they are not likely to get caught doing it. One (not the only) consequence has been that an awful lot of people have been conditioned to believe that everything on the internet should be free. The problem with Lessig's view is that while it is very high-minded and appealing to people who understand it and "sign the Creative Commons Social Contract" there really doesn't seem to be much in the way of enforcement for people who don't care about that.
I think the result will be an increasingly sophisticated mix of Creative-Commons style licensing, micropayments, and traditional distribution and licensing mechanisms, along with a reform of the copyright laws as they now exist. Nobody has the single magic formula that is going to satisfy all the requirements of preserving a cultural commons, protecting the rights of ownership (and the ability to make a profit and run a business), and providing the kind of flexibility and convenience the digitial age demands. We're still in the early stages, even after all the work and debate.
Alex....I'm not sure where you're going with the superbowl analogy there, but I disagree about your perception of these issues.
First...in your context, I'm not so sure that IP is relevant, just copyright issues...so let's just take one at a time.
For one, I'm not sure if there is any way at all to track which of the Creative Commons licenses are being used in what way, to what extent. And I don't think that googling for the CC image would give any indication of it, either. So I'm not sure if there is really any way at all to characterize how people are using the CC licensing, in the way that you are. Maybe Lessig can correct me on that.
Another issue is the perception that you have about discussions on the copyright issue being largely about anarchy versus evil control. Talk about binary thinking. It's not about the users of the licensing or the copyrights, it's about the copyrights, licensing themselves. The characteristics of copyrights (usage, payment, term limits, etc.) is what is at issue.
People who are trading/swapping content against the terms of that content's licensing may be under the impression that they won't get caught, and they may be right to a certain extent. But again, those feelings will change, as more people are caught in violation of licensing....whether it is EULAs on software, conditions of pre-release movies for awards screenings, or copyrighted music.
I would guess that you're right about people not caring about it, but whether any average joe cares is not the point. People not caring about copyrights does not map magically to something wrong with Lessig's view of the issue.
Things like Creative Commons licensing is not about fixing all things involving copyright....and I'm not sure it's meant to, or even hyped that way.
Professor Lessig: I think it is interesting to watch people react to Apple's GarageBand software product. For 3 years I was the general counsel of Sonic Foundry, Inc. (www.sonicfoundry.com), who WAY BACK in 1997 created ACID, the product on which GarageBand is based (the engineer that created ACID for Sonic left and joined Apple in 2002). I guess it goes to show that it is all about marketing dollars, not the quality of the underlying product that matters. At least it is Apple, not Microsoft that is making $ off of Sonic's idea.
Chris Cain:
Ideas are not copyrightable.
Edward: I know that. That wasn't the point. The point was too often marketing $ vs. having the idea or product first is what matters most. And before you point out the obvious again, I understand that is how the market often works; however, that does not make it less frustrating for the company who had the great idea first having to hear everybody rave about the same (and now "new") idea put forth later by a much, much larger company.
When I started out playing with Acid, the big thing I asked about was, was it available for the Mac? Sonic Foundry's answer was stubbornly "no, not ever." I think most amateur musicians and dabblers have been waiting for something like this on the Mac for a long time. That's why there's such a furor over this software. Not the fact that it's a new idea, simply because it's available. I'm convinced if Acid had been ported to the Mac, you would have heard similar praise for it.