November 2010 - Page 2 of 2

â™¡License to Love

Thanks everyone for your comments on Driving Without a License. Crosbie Fitch’s last comment inspired me to make this notice:

â™¡ Copying art is an act of love. Please copy.

What’s great about it is it’s plain old text – you can copy and paste that heart. There is no webding for the copyleft symbol. You could also use the filled-in heart instead of the outline:

â™¥ copying art is an act of love. please copy.

It could be shortened:

â™¡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy.

and varied:

â™¡ Copying art is an act of love. Love is not subject to law.

The â™¡ could graphically substitute for a ©. For example:

â™¡ 2010 by Nina Paley. Please copy.

Don’t care about attribution? Keep it simple and mysterious:

â™¡ 2010

The â™¡ can’t be trademarked (I hope), which means it can’t be controlled. That’s fine with me. Other people can, and do, use â™¡ to mean all sorts of things. But it has a shared cultural meaning that transcends any use one person could put it to. Its power is that it’s not a license, not a trademark. It’s not subject to law.

What do you think?

Driving Without a License?

Since posting about Creative Commons’ branding confusion, several French patriots have suggested I switch to the Art Libre License. I am resisting because I can’t work up enthusiasm for any license today.

The idea that every user could and should understand the complexities of copyright licensing appears increasingly delusional to me. The only people who should need to understand licenses are lawyers and their clients. Most users don’t have legal teams involved with their creative and distributive processes, nor should they. Using licenses – even ShareAlike and Art Libre licenses – legitimizes copyright lawyers and copyright laws and the absurd notion that artists should have to give a damn about them.

The only entities my ShareAlike license would really affect are corporations (or in rare cases, people) with lawyers. But for everyone else, I’m considering marking my work thusly:

There’s no lawyer-approved legalese behind this. It’s just a statement of intent. It’s certainly compatible with the ShareAlike license and its attendant legal code, which I can still use where appropriate (like on the © page of a book, if I really want to back up my intentions with legal force).

Mike Masnick of Techdirt doesn’t use any license at all. It’s a nice idea, not legitimizing copyright law at all, but because everything is copyrighted by default, there’s no way for users to know they are free to copy and share. Every few days some commenter “threatens” Masnick with “unauthorized copying,” to which he responds that he genuinely doesn’t care, so that periodically informs Techdirt regulars. But that’s more labor than I want to put into assuaging users’ fear.

Hopefully users will have less and less fear as time goes on, and there will be less need to assuage. The fact is, most people really don’t care about copyright. Yet they copy. Even as we argue about different licenses, and how to license, and what the Free-est kind of license is, people are ignoring us and just copying what they feel like. They’re not just ignoring the RIAA and MPAA and copyright moralists; they’re ignoring copyright reformers and abolitionists and Creative Commons and the “copy left” too. They may feel some guilt and fear, but our licenses really aren’t going to do anything about that. They don’t care. And that’s fine with me. They shouldn’t care. No one should care about copyright, because copyright shouldn’t exist.

P.S. – which “all rights reversed” style do you like the most?

#1: lower case

#2: ALL-CAPS

#3: colon

UPDATE: Maybe I should just use this:

We don’t like ignorant jerks either

It seems the same people who can’t tell the difference between fraud and copying, also can’t tell the difference between anti-social disregard for authors and copyright reform. Folks invoking my name in the Cooks Source scandal are as clueless as Judith Griggs.

As usual, Techdirt has the best article on the topic:

…Cooks Source Magazine copied one woman’s blog post and published it as an article, without asking her permission or letting her even know about it. They did put her name on it, but she only found out after a friend spotted it and told her about it. Where the story takes a bizarre twist is after emailing with the editor of the magazine, Judith Griggs, asked the original author, Monica, what she wanted. Monica suggested a public apology (on Facebook) and a modest $130 donation to Columbia’s journalism school. That’s when Griggs responded like this:

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

That response not only shows a rather confused understanding of copyright law, but also suggests someone who’s kinda sorta heard arguments about why copying can be beneficial, and jumbled them all together in her head. Now, we’ve spent plenty of time over the years showing how content creators can be better off allowing their works to be copied, but even so, Grigg’s response appears totally tone deaf to what Monica’s actual concerns were. But here’s where social mores and reputational value take over. Monica’s story made it onto Reddit and it got picked up by tons of others, leading the Facebook page of Cooks Source to be filled with angry comments from people supporting Monica.

Read the rest here.

Copy Bunny Progress Bar

Our first Minute Meme, Copying Is Not Theft, continues its steady spread online. The two versions currently most shared are QuestionCopyright.org’s “official” version, which we unfortunately named “best” instead of “official” (“best” implying a value judgement) and the arrangement by Willbe which uses my original wavery vocals (hence my unfortunate value judgement – the official/”best” version has vocals by professional Connie Champagne, which save me the embarrassment of hearing my own voice).

On the Willbe version youtube page, I found a pretty good suggestion in the comments: a Copy Bunny Progress bar. That was easy enough to make; here’s a truncated version in GIF format:

I also uploaded all the original .fla files to archive.org, so you can remix and modify to your heart’s content.

Also, did you know there’s a Copying Is Not Theft cloisonne pin? Well there is! And you can buy it.