Jonathon Delacour (any relation to Fleur in Harry Potter?) makes some thoughtful points about the Creative Commons licensing model, citing Sowell and smith among others:
I wouldn't be so skeptical if the Creative Commons Licenses relied less on a rose-tinted vision of benign collaboration and instead provided greater safeguards for the real interests of those licensing their original works; or if, to borrow Thomas Sowell's words, they replaced - to at least some degree - their "moral vision of human intentions" with a more pragmatic acceptance of the "inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings."

I think mediAgora satisfies this requirement.

Lessig clarifies the permanance issue.

Posted 1:02 AM by Kevin Marks

Copyright Unconstitutional?

Arron Swartz points to and summarily digests a deep article by Jed Rubenfeld on the (un)constitutionality of copyright from the Yale Law Journal. To summarize Aaron's summary:
Copyright is an enumerated power, but civil rights, like the 1^st amendment trump enumerated powers. As he says: Outlawing interstate Bible sales would be unconstitutional, even though interstate commerce is an enumerated power.

The Jed Rubenfeld suggests a form of copyright that he opines would be constitutional; people would be allowed to give away modified works for free, but required to to pay a portion of any profits to the original author. Sounds a whole lot like the MediAgora, doesn't it?

Posted 6:37 AM by jonathan

Tim O'Reilly's Seven lessons

O'Reilly Network: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
Go over there and read this:
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

This fits very well with what I'm saying here.

Posted 12:07 PM by Kevin Marks

we want to edit too

Businessweek: Hollywood's Digital Love/Hate Story
Inersting article for the details, but not as insightful as Glenn's below.

...old-line entertainment execs [won't]be able to fend off tech innovation any more than they could keep at bay the player piano in the 1930s, cable TV in the 1970s, or the VCR in the 1980s. "When technology revolutions occur, people inevitably fight them," says Mark Stolaroff, an independent producer who spent the last five years helping low-budget filmmakers including Joe Carnahan (NARC and Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane) and Christopher Nolan (Memento and Insomnia) break through at recently shuttered studio NextWave Films. "And then suddenly, you turn around and realize, wow, everything has changed."

Posted 10:42 AM by Kevin Marks

Media Feudalism Under Siege

Glenn Reynolds says media work practices are like feudalisam, and will soon be just as obsolete:
A dirt-cheap Chinese-made SKS rifle (which I've seen on sale for as little as $99 - a couple of days' pay at minimum wage) would enable anyone, with only a few hours of training, to put paid to the flower of medieval chivalry, at little risk to himself (or herself - another consequence of technological improvement). Feudalism is dead, as a result, and titled nobility is scarce, and politically unimportant.

The same kind of technological change is happening in the media world, of course. Not long ago, making a movie required a lot of very expensive and specialized equipment, extensive training, and - most significantly - a lot of money. So did making a record album. Now that's changing, too.

In the past couple of weeks I've mastered one record album, released another, and captured still images from digital videotape to be put on the website that will soon promote a documentary on teenaged killers that my wife is making. A project like hers would have cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars not long ago (in fact, that's the actual price tag of one project much like hers from the early 1990s). Now, with video instead of film, and digital editing on a computer, you can make a documentary for a price measured in thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

Posted 1:01 AM by Kevin Marks

No P2P taxes please

Cory points to Neil Netanal's proposal(788k pdf) for a compulsory levy on computers or internet connections to pay copyright holders in return for fair use rights over digital media.

This idea is floating round a lot at the moment; it is flawed in a few ways.

1. By statutorily imposing a solution like this, it makes it much harder to establish a true marketplace for digital media - people are reluctant to pay twice. This will reduce overall spending on music.

2. Statistical measurement of a scale-free distribution like music (or the net) is hard to do well - because the central limit theorem does not apply, most sampling will count the large players accurately, but miss significant numbers of small players who may well predominate in aggregate. This kind of centralised scheme undoes the bottom-up formation and propogation of musical styles that the net can do, and puts us back into a top 20 world.

3. Any centralised taxation-like scheme is highly prone to capture by a few interest groups - ASCAP and BMI are poorly regarded by independent musicians for this very reason.

4. By legitimating only non-commercial repurposing of existing copyright, it does nothing to cut through the thicket of rights and licensing that acts as dead weight on those who create; instead it pushes derived works into a second-class non-commercial status. My model in which derivative works pass through the cost of the source works is far more liberating.

A far better idea is to establish a true marketplace for media that incorporates incentives for those who buy and sell within it to reward copyright holders.

Posted 8:56 AM by Kevin Marks