Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)

The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities.

My point being, everyone takes ideas from other people – how can we not? It’s particularly so now, when many of us are exposed to a tidal wave of data on any given day. So what happens when someone gets the idea that copyright is primarily an ugly mask of contemporary capitalism and that culture should return to the ‘commons’, thereby supporting community culture?

Enter stage left: Creative Commons.

The internet and digital technologies provide us with an enormous potential to access and share knowledge. Information can be communicated in an instant across the globe, cheaply and with good quality, by even the most basic internet user. However, while the technology has the capacity, the traditional approaches to managing copyright limits the reuse of material and significantly hamper its negotiability in the digital environment.

A number of copyight experts, most notably Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University, frustrated by the fact that technology offered so much but that negotiability of copyright material was so cumbersome, came up with the idea of the Creative Commons. Lessig’s vision was for a space in the internet world where people could share and reuse copyright material without fear of being sued – a creative commons. To create this, copyright owners would use a generic licence to give permission in advance for certain uses of their material. Rather than the ‘all rights reserved’ of traditional copyright law, Lessig aimed to create a voluntary ‘some rights reserved’ system.

Creative Commons is now a worldwide project that encourages copyright owners to allow others to share, reuse and remix their material, legally. We offer a range of licences that creators can use to manage their copyright in the online environment, each offering its own specific protections and freedoms. We have built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” system.

There are six major Creative Commons licences. Adopting such a licence doesn’t mean you relinquish you copyright, but rather that you’re exercising more control over your intellectual property. As a result, your material can be used more freely but with conditions, like the following:

Attribution (CC-BY)
Attribution – Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
Attribution – No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
Attribution – Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC)
Attribution – Noncommercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
Attribution – Noncommercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

For a breakdown of what these agreements mean, visit Creative Commons Australia. Suffice to say the licences all come with the base restriction that the original author must be credited.

There are a number of criticisms of Creative Commons, which, fundamentally, relate to what you think the purpose of copyright is. However, the central tenet of copyright – that it protects the financial and artistic future of writers and artists – now looks hollow, thanks to the likes of Cory Doctorow and the Copyleft movement.

The Free Software Foundation, on the other hand, has criticised Creative Commons for not going far enough. They argue that creators should be able to use Creative Commons material as they see fit and advocate for an ‘unconditional’ publishing position.

Maybe they have a point, but it’s hard enough to relinquish one’s work for editing, let alone put it out in the netasphere without any qualms or attachments.

The work being produced under creative commons is exciting. Take for instance, Gogol Bordello’s ‘Immigraniada’ (my current favourite song, produced by the man who convinced Jonny Cash to cover ‘Hurt’ – no small feat, I imagine):

Creative Commons licencing has taken off more locally as well. Lisa Dempster published her Neon Pilgrim under a creative commons licence, and she wrote an insightful post about why she did so at SPUNC.

Even more recently, the thirty-third issue of Cordite was a Creative Commons-themed publication and the issue is available to download as a Word document. Cordite invited – nay challenged – readers and creators ‘to download these poems, remix them, chop them up, add a little gravy and generally act like a word salad DJ. Then simply send your remixes to us, and we’ll publish the best ones right here on the Cordite site, under a Creative Commons license’.

In addition, the issue has five essays on Creative Commons and copyright so you probably best get your copy after finishing this post. (Did I mention it was guest edited by Alison Croggon, person of multi-talents and multi-smarts?)

I thought I would finish with a quote from 79-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, who has come forward to show solidarity with a man charged with music piracy in France. Godard said, ‘There is no such thing as intellectual property.’ And went on to add: ‘Copyright really isn’t feasible. An author has no rights. I have no rights. I have only duties.’

Who can predict what a future of community culture might hold?