Doing Business Without Copyright · Friday January 29, 2010 by Crosbie Fitch
Maniquí said 5188 days ago :
Both interesting articles that I will eventually have to re-read.
I wonder one thing: which is the most common license (or the ideal one) this musicians are choosing when releasing their music for free? Is it a CC licence? Or tjey release them to public domain?
(Sorry if I’m missing something).
Crosbie Fitch said 5188 days ago :
Well, the closest thing to a popular copyleft license for music is CC-ShareAlike. It’s the most ideal (so far), because it neutralises copyright more than any other CC license. There may well be more ideal licenses, but they aren’t so popular. Ideally copyright would be abolished so it didn’t need neutralising.
As to what license musicians are actually choosing, well, that’s a question better answered by Creative Commons, or possibly another organisation likely to be surveying licensing.
There is CC0, but it’s particularly tricky to prevent a work covered by copyright from being covered by copyright.
The ‘public domain’ is ‘all published works’. Some people use the term to describe published works no longer ‘protected’ by copyright, but that definition is unrecognised by copyright law. You can’t ‘release something from copyright protection’, you can only partially neutralise it with a copyleft license, i.e. it still remains covered by copyright.
Copyright contaminates and pollutes culture like radioactive waste. You can’t get rid of it. You can neutralise it to it to make it safer, but otherwise you have to wait at least a couple of centuries for it to expire – probably longer. Fortunately, like tobacco, people should soon recognise how harmful it is and abolish it within the decade.
Here are a couple of articles by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, well worth reading if you were losing hope that artists could do business without suing or taxing their fans:
Artists and fans are already connecting, already doing business without copyright. To institute compulsory license fees as many are now proposing will simply take money from fans with a tiny fraction ending up in the artist’s pocket. There is no point to such Internet taxes except to provide a paltry pension to retired artists, and ‘money for nothing’ to labels and collections societies.
_________________
Hat tip Michael Castello