The New Freedom

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I love Creative Commons. For those not yet in the know, Creative Commons is a set of copyleft (as opposed to copyright) licenses for creative works like music, photographs, films, essays and websites. Since they were first published in December 2002, there have been hundreds and hundreds of thousands of works licensed under various CC licenses. Some of the greatest projects of our time, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare, use them. A CC’d sound effect was used in the recent movie Children of Men (which was absolutely fantastic, by the way). Acceptance for the license is growing globally and their legality has been proven in court. However, I feel there is a type of evil greed that undercuts the good intentions of the foundation, hidden in its subtle support of the existing copyright structure.

They were inspired by the highly successful GNU/GPL license, originally written by the wonderfully bearded UNIX god, Richard Stallman (who looks a bit like Aqua Teen ad guy). Linux, the free and open operating system, is the most famous example of GPL’d project, but odds are that these days, some software on your computer, in your router or even in your phone is GPL’d. This means that you are totally free to copy it, change it, and redistribute it. This method of copying, changing, and redistributing ideas has been responsible for all human invention and innovation, ever. One man comes up with a nearly-round object that rolls decently, another man sees that object, changes it a little and then tells other people about it, and suddenly man has invented the wheel. This logic can be found in all areas of human creation. That is, until the concepts of patent and copyright through a spanner in the gears of creation. Suddenly, man isn’t free to copy ideas any more, and therefore can’t improve on those ideas to make new ones. The intellectual and artistic process grinds to a halt. The defining characteristic of our generation is our free access to digital information, and yet rather than using that access to significantly speed up the creative process, we face ridiculous restrictions that turn us from artists into criminals.

Ideas and information are the same thing. When you release an mp3 of a song of a jpg of art you have created, you are releasing the digital information, but are also releasing an idea. You may be the idea’s creator, but that doesn’t mean that you are it’s owner. Nobody can own idea. Once it reaches the collective conscience, it belongs to everybody. Everybody is free to improve on that idea. Unfortunately, this is not the way things stand legally. Together, we should be working to change this. Instead, some are compromising by using the Creative Commons license, but I am not a man of compromise when it’s clear how things should really be.

I have been trying to work in the emerging artistic medium of video collage (so fresh, there isn’t even a wikipedia article to link to). I have some ideas for for films that I’d like to make, unfortunately I don’t have the immense amount of resources that it takes to produce a movie. Instead, I remix existing video and audio tracks to create new works. I was trying to stay in the spirit of the Commons by using only CC’d works. However, I kept finding that all of the clips I wanted to use had a -noderivs tag on the license, meaning that I wasn’t free to sample and modify their ideas. Well, fuck that! I refuse to let stupid, bullshit copyright rules from making the projects that I want to make. Pointless laws and rules should never stand in the way of human innovation and creation.

A few weeks ago, BoingBoing posted this video of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the 23C3 conference in Berlin. He specifically mentions digital video collage on YouTube as one of the problems with modern copyright law. It’s worth watching if you’re interested in the subject and have the time. After the speech, he had a debate with John Perry Barlow about strategies of the ‘copyfight’. After the debate, BB interviewed him, where he dropped this epic jem of a quote: If you wanna share something - share it. If you wanna use something - use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of don’t take things without attribution.[…] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on - break it. And every time they pass a new law - break that. And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Fuck you, old people in charge, everything has changed. Hurry up and die so people who understand things can get rid of all of the damage you’ve caused.

All in all, I still love what Creative Commons stands for at heart. I love free culture, I love the power being returned to the people, I love people encouraging each other to be creative. I just don’t like the details. Notice that Wikipedia, which is the greatest thing mankind has ever attempted, as far as I’m concerned, does not use a CC license. Imagine if you had to pay attribution to all Wikipedians who worked on a page any time referred to information on Wikipedia, or if you weren’t allowed to improve on it. It would be a complete and utter failure. To artists who still want to retain some kind of licensing over their works, instead of using CC licencse, I encourage them to use the Free Art License, as recommended by the Free Software Foundation, which is more akin to the GPL.

Phew.
Films to come soon!

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