Its downright obvious that the video from political debates should be free to everyone to use, quot from, remix, etc.
Lawrence Lessig has written letters to the RNC and DNC so suggesting, and its hard to see good arguments against this. (I can think of plenty of bad arguments).
My paper Copyright’s Communications Policy was on the long history of copyright lawuits being used to set national communications policy, as incumbents used copyright as a means of slowing or trying to destroy their rivals.
The Verizon v. Vonage litigation suggests a new chapter, on patent. Verizon is using patent to try and kill a rival, with implications for communications policy. The merits of the patent suit I cannot say; but this is a classic example of IP rights playing a role in communications policy — potentially decisive in this case.
My latest Slate piece was born of a teenage obsession with the Lonely Planet guides. As I wrote in a part of the piece that was (thankfully) cut
While its embarrassing to admit, at a younger age I put a kind of faith in LP that most people reserve for thicker books written by prophets. I savored their advice for adapting to foreign cultures: do not touch people with your feet, try not to lose your temper when cheated, and be careful about where you skinny dip. I even considered, but never followed the LP’s famous advice: “to save weight, saw the handle off of your toothbrush.†For a lifetime LP-addict, giving up the book for this trip was not undertaken lightly.
I was at Yale on Wednesday giving my “Treaties’ Domains†paper at Oona Hathaway’s international law seminar. But later on I dropped by the Yale Information Society Project and had a chat about an interesting idea.
Eddan Katz was talking about a paper by Tony Reese about the reverter interest in copyright and its effect on creative commons licenses. This made me wonder – is there more of a place for a creative commons license that includes a reverter? For all I know this may be a well-discussed issue among creative commons people, but I’m curious.
Right now CC licenses are irrevocable. As the site says, “Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license.”
But might this be sometimes usefully different? For example, say I license my photographs subject to a reverting creative commons license. Most of my photos I am perfectly happy with everyone using as they like. But maybe I just so happened to take a photo of Yochai Benkler that becomes famous and worth millions. In that case I might want to revert that license, and, in the future, start licensing the photo for a fee.
There’s a few problems with the proposal. First no one would want to use a CC work that could later be revoked, to the tune of possibile liability. It’s almost like a trap. Second, the structure of the CC contract makes it hard to see how your work, already out there, might be restricted from further usage. But if you somehow wrote a license that grandfathered specific uses before revocation, but stopped others, that might be something.
Another option is a license that came with an expiration date – this is free to use until 2010, say.
The attraction is that such licenses might encourage more people to put their potentially valuable work under open licenses, at least for a while, to test the waters, and see what gets popular. On the other hand, the idea might be bad, and create even more copyright confusion.
I’m trying to get better at taking portraits
