Ever since we interviewed John Sullivan, Campaigns Manager for The Free Software Foundation in Boston, our heads have been spinning with the possibilities that ‘Free as in Freedom’ Software holds. If you’re looking at this on the web, you’ll see that our site is a pimped out WordPress blog- a free and open blogging platform. There are lots of crazy thumbnails and video playing plug-ins that we’ve helped to build through our collaborative Show-In-A-Box project. All of this is possible because of Free and Open Software.
Free is the idea (and the reality) that people should have the right to use their software in any way they see fit. Modifications, hacks, customizations and copies-lots of copies- should be allowed. If you’re using any operating system besides GNU-Linux (this would be Mac and Windows and a huge percentage of the population) and proprietary software made by these companies and many others, you literally don’t have the right to change, copy or distribute any of it. That CD you made your friend of that cheesy FTP program? Nope, that’s totally illegal. Unless of course it’s Free Software (like my favorite FTP app, Cyberduck), then it’s wholly encouraged for you to share and even open up the code and modify it and share it some more.
We love free software because as people with big imaginations and some techy, smart developer friends, we can build things the way we want them rather than wait for a big corporation to build them for us. We have the Freedom to share our code and encourage others to modify and share alike. Much like Creative Commons, The Free Software Foundation embraces copyleft which gives both creator and user the freedom to work together.
Check out our new Ogg Theora video feed and subscribe in your favorite free video aggregator or check out Miro!
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It really makes me happy to see more and more people adopting Free Software every day. It’s amazing to have watched its progression over the past five years. It’s becoming increasingly popular with the hacker and DIY communities like vloggers for its flexibility. There’s already a Free Software alternative to FireANT called PenguinTV. The one thing we need for the vloggers now is a good video editor. The current state of video editing in Free Software is not quite there yet. There’s a project called Diva that’s targeting the iMovie crowed. I hope your efforts start inspiring people to contribute to the Diva project.
I think this video, and others should be released under the CC-BY-SA license, rather than the BY-NC license.
Permitting commercial use of works is one example of freedom for creative works. Therefore your video about freedom, in this case, free software, is non-free.
BY-SA is similar to the GPL in that, if you use BY-SA material in your work, you MUST license under the same terms.
Good point. Wouldn’t CC-By be even more free? We could just take off the non-commercial part of it.
yes and no. It wouldn’t preserve the freedom, which is just as important as providing it, in my opinion.
good point. Share-alike is more restrictive, but it does make sure others can have access to it. let us think on it. we’ve been having these debates in the Videoblogging community for the last year. Which CC license is better for media?
I believe CC-BY-SA is the best for all media. It’s the copyleft concept for culture.
the non-commercial in the CC license is actually pretty open to interpretation, oddly enough. it doesn’t mean that people can’t use it for commercial purposes, it means they need to talk to us first and either ask permission or enter into a contract with us where we say it’s ok for them to make money off what we created. i know that’s different than GPL and is leaning more towards copyright but i think it’s important for independent media creators to not get taken advantage of by larger media distributors. that being said, i’m not sure what the best answer is, because as was pointed out, that makes it less free and more permissions based which could be ‘protected’ by a Share Alike clause. hmmmm you’ve got me thinking! BY-SA would be more restrictive yet more free….right?
no ‘big media company’ is going to touch BY-SA, unless they’re progressive, in which case, it’s all good.
EMI, Disney, Sony, etc aren’t going to want those terms, so they’ll negotiate anyway.
BY-NC stops the FSF putting the Ogg Theora version on a DVD they sell, for example. Sure, they could ask, but they shouldn’t need to
The line I tend to draw on the matter of which license to use is rather subject. Most of my code I release under the LGPL, which allows commercial reuse and doesn’t require releasing your own code. I do this mostly because it’s a useful thing and it’s a net negative on society to reinvent the wheel. Most media that I release on my blog I release under the non-commercial CC license because it falls under the very lose category of art. It’s not something that’s useful and it’s my creation. If someone wants to benefit from in financially I’d like control over what they do with it. However if I were releasing instructional videos I’d probably use CC-By.
Mike: GPL allows commercial use too. What it prevents is proprietary use.
The LGPL doesn’t allow you to change your code and make it proprietary, it just allows proprietary things to link to it.
Commercial use and benefiting from things financially are different too. And if it’s BY-SA, you can benefit from it as much, if not more than they can, if you’re smart about it and have a bigger audience.
Think of it like this. If Radiohead released an album BY-SA, and tons of people did mashups and such of that work, who’d make more money from those mashups? Radiohead could sell CDs or downloads of those things, without permission and make a lot more than you or I could, because it’s their work.
Apply the same thoughts to $SOME-LOCAL-BAND and the same thing works.
Right, of course. Propriety non commercial. They are so often the same I just forget to use the right word.
Great video! Thank You!
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the DVD “Revolution OS,” but for anyone who isn’t, it’s a really inspiring film.
PS: I tried to put this video on the home page of our wiki:
http://art110.wikispaces.com/
But I got this error message:
The HTML you have entered is not valid HTML: Element textarea does not carry attribute cols
You sparked a great conversation about CC Licensing. I quit licensing my own work under “Share-Alike” because, as someone looking for media to re-use, especially music, I had to reject most of the “Share-Alike” licensed music because I did NOT want to license my work under the same exact terms. For example sometimes I would find something licensed under a more restrictive license than the one I would choose for my own work. I had just about forgotten that “Share-Alike” also means “if I make it free, you gotta keep it free.”
I’m still not willing to give up “NonCommercial.” While Matt is right, in general no “big media company” is going to touch “Share-Alike” licensed work, it’s still possible for independent creators to be taken advantage of. Witness the recent Podtech/Lan Bui debacle. The thing I want to protect my work against is the people who grab my RSS feed to populate their ad-filled “podcast directory” without giving me the choice to opt-out of being listed. There are no ads displayed next to my work on my site. I don’t want ads next to my work on someone else’s site. Period. And don’t tell me “if you don’t want your work stolen don’t put it on the Internet” – I’m sick of that line.
I have successfully argued that the ads constitute commercial use and gotten people to take my feed down from their directory. I don’t want that possibility to go away. Commercial use without kicking back to creators gives us no incentive to keep going, and I don’t think “Non-Commercial” is an unreasonable restriction on freedom until this kind of stuff gets a lot less common. You can always ask my permission and it will not take that much extra time.
Them’s my two cents.
Here’s a hypothetical example of how CC-NC affects the ability of musicians to get kick-backs when their work is used commercially:
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=82
crosbie, good link. So let me summarize the argument. CC-ShareAlike is the best choice because someone is free to do whatever they want with it (remix, make money, repost, etc) as long as they allow someone else to do the same with what they make.
GNU, which is basically CC-SA, is popular in software where anyone can grab your code to use…as long as they share their code.
For videobloggers, many of us have recently adopted CC-Attribution since it seems most free. It allows you to do what you want with it, as long as you give obvious credit. In the media world, linkbacks and name recognition is most important.
I’m wondering if the difference between the realities of software and media are exposed here. For software, you want your code to spread everywhere. You want those codebases to be open. I assume commercial companies adopt GPL because they realize they can sell services around the free software.
In media, we want commercial companies to use our videos so we can get our ideas and images out into the mainstream. But commercial companies will not share their own media. Why would they? There are no services for them to sell around free media. An HBO show is just an HBO show. If an HBO uses my media, then needs to make their show freely available, what’s in it for them if then their show becomes free as in beer.
I’m really liking this conversation. Maybe you free software folks can help us think through these issues with media. Are you just saying “fuck big media” and create a totally alternative structure?
Glad you liked the link Jay.
Free Software has come at cultural freedom from a software focussed perspective.
The GPL attempts to rectify four key problems with the copyright based software development model:
1) Source code does not tend to be available because there is no incentive to sell or publish the source code. This is because copyright permits the developer to sell copies of the binary derivatives.
2) Copyright necessarily prohibits copying/sharing of published software – so you always buy from the copyright holder who enjoys the privilege of a monopoly on reproduction.
3) Being based upon modified copies, derivatives are also prohibited, thus it is impossible to modify published software to fix its problems or otherwise improve it.
4) Software publishers believe they can force purchasers to accept licences that constrain their use of the software.
The GPL neutralises the constraints of copyright in all these respects, not just for the purchaser, but also for whoever the purchaser conveys the software to whether they modify it or not.
However, the GPL negates the harm caused by copyright in a direct, utilitarian manner.
In addition to neutralising copyright, it also specifically mandates that any published derivative must be unobfuscated (or that an unobfuscated version is made easily available).
One would arrive at something very similar to the GPL from an ethical perspective too, and this is how I prefer to look at things.
I suggest it’s best to think in terms of human rights:
* The human right to life.
* The human right to privacy.
* The human right to truth.
* The human right to liberty – which is actually one’s right not to have one’s freedom constrained except by the above.
Then we can recognise that copyright and patent are unethical privileges that suspend the public’s liberty in order to create commercially lucrative advantages for publishers and manufacturers.
Fundamentally, free culture and free software are about restoring everyone’s intellectual property rights by neutralising the anachronistic privileges that suspend them.
We can do this:
1) informally, by convention through peer pressure and public opprobrium,
2) formally, by copyright licence (copyleft) such as the GPL or CC-SA,
3) legislatively, by abolishing the privileges,
4) illegally, by civil disobedience.
Bear in mind though, there is absolutely no antagonism or antipathy toward commercial production and exploitation of free culture. Indeed a free and fair market is embraced, hence the rejection of monopolies over reproduction. Such state granted monopolies are inherently incompatible with a free market.
Moreover, free culture is NOT about discrediting the idea of intellectual property, but about discrediting the commercial privileges that are used to constrain and prosecute the public. Free culture is about restoring full ownership of the intellectual works one purchases, i.e. being free to copy or modify the IP that you’ve legitimately obtained.
Free culture also means the restoration of artists’ freedom to sell their copies or modifications of the published works they’ve bought or been given. So, you can immediately see that the privilege of prohibiting any other artist from making commercial use of your published work is anathema. All artist’s should be free to exchange their labour in incorporating or building upon a published work, in a free market, whether for money or anything else.
Note that Creative Commons is not a proponent of free culture, but promotes copyright as a privilege rightfully reserved for authors as opposed to publishers – it has an authorial perspective. It espouses an author’s ‘freedom of choice’ in how they exploit their copyright privileges (as opposed to the emancipation of the public). Thus CC is agnostic as to whether authors reserve most of copyright’s privileges (CC-NC) or surrender most of them (CC-SA), it simply believes this should be the author’s choice. So, CC tacitly supports copyright.
CC has also created a little confusion regarding attribution.
There is a fundamental right to truth (also known as moral rights) and in terms of attribution there is consequently a right to truth or accuracy in attribution. However, there is no right to attribution per se. Certainly the privilege of copyright enables a licence to make its permissions contingent upon attribution, but that doesn’t make attribution a right.
Some would argue that compulsory attribution actually harms the value of the attribution, e.g. it is better to be given credit by another artist because they value your work, than because if they don’t they’ll be prosecuted.
Truth in attribution is actually all an artist needs. Moreover, in some jurisdictions (Europe) moral rights assure this irrespective of copyright.
As to whether CC-SA is best, well if you prefer to use a Creative Commons licence, then yes, it is the most culturally free licence they offer.
For people who don’t expect to be able to afford legal departments it may be sufficient and preferable to adopt a less formal expression, e.g. The Libertarian Licence: “You are free to take any liberties you wish with my published work, with but one constraint: The liberties you take may not be withheld from those to whom you give my work (or your combined/derivative work), who you must similarly constrain.”. See http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=54
As for myself I prefer “This is a work of free culture. It respects all artists equally: those whose work I build upon, myself, and those who build upon my work. I hope some day you’ll join us.”
There are many others. http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses
As for making money, well, if you have an audience who wants you to produce great videos, then instead of selling them copies with the threat of prosecuting them if they make their own, why not sell them the video in the first place, and let them make all the copies they want?
For example, if you’d normally sell a thousand copies of your video at $1 each to make $1,000. Why not invite your audience to pay you $1,000 for the video, and let copies be made freely? Each member of the audience pays the same $1. You get the same $1,000. The only difference is, you don’t have the commercial privilege of a monopoly over copies – and nor does anyone else. It’s a free for all, and everyone has their cultural freedom back.
The great thing is, copies of your videos then spread far and wide building up the size of your audience ten-fold so that they can pay you $10,000 for your next video.