Free Culture vs. Fear Culture vs. Fee Culture
Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.
Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an environment where “How much profit can I make?” and “How can other people take the risks associated with my profit?” are the questions most often asked when working up legal agreements.
Further compounding this problem is the fact that lawyers profit off of the fear and entropy generated by complex and hostile legal environments – at least, they will until the system becomes unsustainable and collapses under a Himalayas-worth of contracts, precedents, book law, treaties and paranoia.
Free Culture, Free Software and Open Source licensing provide some antidote to this toxic environment, by providing terms that fairly balance opportunity and risk across the parties involved. Under these licensing scheme, each party has nearly the same set of rights and gets to behave much as if they own the work that is being licensed – under any of these licenses, I am free to make, modify and share or sell copies of the original work. The benefits of this are enormous and, at times, subtle. For example, when a work is licensed under a Free Culture or Free Software license, it makes it much harder and less economically viable to take the rights associated work from the original author at some point in the future.
Even though I deal with Free Culture, Free Software and Open Source licensing on a daily basis and my career was built in the PHP and MySQL communities, I still breathe in the general atmosphere of paranoia.
This is probably why I chose to require that videos be submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license — I let my fear of someone misusing the videos outweigh the benefits from allowing commercial use. People with bad intentions will do bad things with the videos, often regardless of the license on the work. Preventing people who do create good in society from using the work in a broad way is just providing extra advantage to those who break the rules.
So, as soon as I go and edit the relevant wiki pages, I’ll be asking people to choose Free Culture licensing for their videos.
Posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 14:12
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February 16th, 2009 at 14:43
It is often very easy for free software advocates to shut out commercial participation. I lobbied for ShareAlike By Attribution so that commercial entities could participate easily in the Drupal handbooks. It also removes the difficulty of deciding what is / isn’t a commercial entity or commercial use.
February 16th, 2009 at 16:10
I’d like to disagree with you, but I was an example in favor of your argument – at least as it pertained to Free Culture works in a medium that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about.
February 17th, 2009 at 09:50
Why is the profit motive a bad thing?
No, seriously, why?
People (taken as generally as US law takes them, which would include companies and associations) have varying motivations for their actions. Some people act for enjoyment, others to advance a cause, and yet others to make a living. Why is making a living worse than the other two? As long as you don’t directly intend harm to someone else and take reasonable steps to avoid visiting unintentional harm, what’s wrong with your primary goal being simply to make money for yourself, your employees, and/or your shareholders?
February 17th, 2009 at 10:45
Hey Jeff,
I think that we both want people profiting, “as long as (they) don’t directly intend harm to someone else and take reasonable steps to avoid visiting unintentional harm”
Perhaps give the post another read? I’m not closing down the licensing, I’m opening it up to commercial use.
February 18th, 2009 at 09:50
I like to use the GPL for my programming efforts and cc BY-SA for my artistic efforts. The one thing that I still seem to have internal issues with is when it comes to the images of people either in still photographs or in video / film.
Good to see the move to Freedom though.
drew
February 19th, 2009 at 02:15
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