Proposing CC-PRO: A License For Professionals

Submitted by kfogel on Sat, 2009-10-10 19:10

What's the best license for professionals to use? Our fantasy answer is CC-PRO, the Creative Commons license we'd like to see...

"Artists Should Be Compensated For Their Work"

Submitted by ninapaley on Mon, 2009-09-07 16:11

(Translations: Polski.)

Nina Paley is the author of the freely-licensed hit animated film Sita Sings the Blues, among many other things, and is Artist in Residence at QuestionCopyright.org. She is also a committed Free Culture activist who writes frequently about copyright and how the permission culture affects art and artists.

This phrase comes up in many discussions of copyright: "Artists should be compensated for their art." It is assumed that a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their Art, and b) copyright is a mechanism for this compensation.

I challenge both assumptions.

Of course, what people actually say is usually "Artists should be compensated for their work". Below I'm going to distinguish between Art and Work, because confusing the two is exactly the problem.

a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their work.

I agree that artists are entitled to payment FOR THEIR WORK.

WORK is labor exchanged for money. Employer and worker negotiate a fee, the labor is performed, and the worker is paid. Many artists are workers: they are waiters, baristas, truck drivers. They should be compensated for their work, and they are, which is why they work.

Some artists perform a kind of skilled labor for money. This type of pre-negotiated labor is called a commission. Commissioned work is work, and artists are compensated for it, which is why artists take commissions.

Wanted: Examples of Copyright Being Used For Censorship

Submitted by kfogel on Sun, 2009-08-16 10:26

Do you know some great examples of copyright being used to censor?

If so, please share them by commenting here or by sending us email. We're putting together a presentation about the equivalence between copyright and censorship, and need to have an overwhelming number of examples at hand — enough to make it clear that the ones we choose to highlight have been picked from an ocean of candidates. We need compelling examples because the most important ones are the hardest to show: when an artist unconsciously steers away from an idea because of rights issues, that is censorship, but it is internalized and thus invisible to the outside world. We need examples to help make clear the link between visible, externally-imposed censorship and the much more common self-imposed censorship that copyright law encourages.

A great starting point is the Electronic Frontier Foundations's Takedown Hall of Shame, listing people and organizations who have used copyright law (especially the DMCA) to squash criticism.

But situations where copyright suppresses art itself are just as important, and are just as much censorship as political censorship is. Some examples:

J.D. Salinger uses copyright to censor another author.
The James Joyce Estate bans non-cooperating editions of Joyce's works.
How the play Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire ran into a streetcar named censorship.
The story of Sita Sings the Blues: how copyright almost prevented a popular and award-winning film from reaching audiences.
The story of Eyes on the Prize: how copyright prevented an important film from reaching audiences for years.
The same story yet again: copyright prevented the film Killer of Sheep from being released for 30 years.
...help us dig up more...

The audience we're aiming at is groups already concerned about freedom of expression who may not have considered copyright as a systemic form of censorship. For example, the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, the Index On Censorship, and the Authors Guild. Note that such groups are often comprised of writers and artists who came of age in the pre-Internet, copyright-controlled era, so it is especially important to have an overwhelming amount of data to show that there is a problem here.

The Free Expression Policy Project seems to already have copyright-based censorship on their radar screen; there's probably some good stuff in the archives there. Also, if you're an artist who has been affected by this kind of censorship, we definitely want to hear from you!

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