QCO Artist-in- Residence Nina Paley will be speaking on a panel on October 1, 2011 at the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, PA. The panel entitled “Free As In Freedom” will be a lively discussion between Nina and the founder of the free software movement Richard M. Stallman. Considering Richard and Nina haven’t seen each other since she issued her Rantifesto, which challenges the reluctance shown by many in the free software community to embrace free culture, it is sure to be a rousing debate! More details here.
The Public Domain may not be growing (thanks to endless retroactive copyright term extensions) but it still contains a “whopping plentitude.” The biggest challenge to users is simply discovering PD works in the first place. Fortunately the Open Knowledge Foundation (one of the best Free Culture organizations anywhere) has just given everyone a leg up with its new web site, the Public Domain Review. From their About page:
The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.
Go there to find all kinds of delicious images, texts, sounds, and other treasures that, thanks to our collective cultural amnesia, are as fresh and exciting as anything Big Media tries forcing down our throats today.
Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn’t have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other’s work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world.
The opposite of “free culture” is “permission culture”, which you probably don’t need to have explained in detail because you’re familiar with it already. In the permission culture, if I write a book and you want to translate it, you have to get my permission first (or, more likely, the permission of my publisher). Similarly, if I wrote a song and you want to use it in your movie, you have to go through a series of steps to get clear permission to do so. Our laws are written such that permission culture is currently the default.
In free culture, you just translate the book, use the song, etc. If I don’t like the translation or the film, I’m free to say so, of course, but I wouldn’t have any power to suppress or alter your works. Of course, free culture goes both ways: I’m also free to put out a modified copy of your movie using a different song, recommend someone else’s translation that I think is better, etc. These are idealized examples, for the sake of illustration, but they give the general idea: freedom takes precedence over commercial monopolies.
There is plenty of free culture out there already. In the past all culture was free culture; in today’s legal environment, the way people create free culture is to put their work out under a free license — a special copyright license that explicitly allows most of the activities that standard copyrights prohibit. Free culture means you can perform it, record it, distribute it, use it in your own works, and anything else. It does not mean you can claim credit for things you didn’t do; that would just be fraud or plagiarism (fortunately, it turns out that allowing works to spread freely is the best way to prevent plagiarism anyway).
Free culture artists make money too. Mostly they do so in the same ways artists always have: direct audience support, commissions, patronage, government and academic support, etc. (Copyright-controlled distribution has never been a major source of funding for art, and wasn’t designed to be.) Free culture artists make a point of working with their audiences instead of against them. They inhabit the Internet as natives, instead of stumbling around in awkward space-suits made of contracts and copyrights and permission forms whose real purpose is to cause enough friction that a corporation has to be paid off to reduce it.
Distilled into a few basic principles, free culture means:
Artists can use each others’ work without asking permission. If you’re not already convinced that freedom is valuable in itself, read this. Or this. Or this.
People can receive and transmit art by whatever physical means are available to them. We’ve got an Internet — let’s not be afraid to use it.
The distinction between audience and artist is fluid, and should remain so because culture is participatory. Free culture means anyone can engage with art and other works of the mind, however they want, without hiring a lawyer first.
Artists are paid for what they do, not for what other people do. Artists should be paid up front for the work they do. But charging again for music every time a copy is exchanged, for example, is silly. The musicians didn’t do extra work to make more copies, and the copies are transactions between third parties. In the long run, making it harder to share art hurts artists as much as audiences.
Monopolies hurt everyone except the monopolist. Permission cultures tend to concentrate control in the hands of people who specialize in accumulating control, without doing much to help artists. There’s nothing wrong with running a business that deals with art and artists, of course; the problem isn’t middlemen, it’s monopolies.
One common argument you’ll hear against free culture is that “it should be the artist’s choice” — that if an artist chooses to put their work out under a free license, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be required to do so. However, this argument is not as convincing as it first seems. When an artist (or, let’s be realistic, a corporation) is given the power to restrict what other people can do with their own copies of things, that takes away everyone else’s choice. When two “choices” oppose each other, we cannot resolve the issue by appealing to choice itself as a value — we have to actually look at which choice is better. Free culture’s answer is that freedom should take precedence; that since no one forces an artist to release their work, once they do release it, it should really be free to spread. Remember, this isn’t about credit: of course artists should be properly credited for their work. But that’s very different from controlling who can see and use the work.
These issues simmered until the Internet came along, and then they really started to boil. Copying became physically so cheap as to be almost costless, and yet the laws against copying only got tighter and tighter, as a frightened industry lobbied for longer copyright terms and more restrictions. This is the dynamic that has given rise to the free culture movement.
(By the way, it was that industry who invented copyright in the first place — in the late 1600s and early 1700s, printers devised it as a replacement for an expiring censorship-based monopoly system. I can’t emphasize that enough: a system designed by business for business is not going to put artists’ interests first, and that’s why it never has. Free culture is not anti-business: there are lots of ways to make money, and if some of those ways involve helping artists and audiences connect, that’s great. In a sense, free culture stands for truly free markets. It is merely against monopolies that force artists and audiences to get permission, usually for a fee and under restrictive terms, to use or access certain works.)
If you’re interested in learning more about free culture, there’s lots of material on this site and elsewhere on the Internet (the Students for Free Culture site is a good resource, though I think it could be clearer on exactly which freedoms are important). There’s an in-depth article here that covers the issues more thoroughly and with more historical context; and here is a good analysis of the harms done by permission culture. If you like what you read about free culture and want to support it, there are lots of things you can do. Whenever possible, support artists directly and by choice, not through intermediaries and under duress. Help sponsor an art project on Kickstarter, and encourage your favorite artists to use direct audience support and release their works under free licenses. Translate, edit, or otherwise contribute to a free cultural work. Release your own works under free licenses. Share this article :-). Spread skepticism whenever you see special pleading, especially in word choice: copying is not “theft”, “filesharing” is really “music sharing”, a copied DVD is not equivalent to a “lost sale”, etc.
Free culture is culture. That’s all it has ever been. The question is simply how much we value freedom.
The arrest of Aaron Swartz is clearly uncalled for: he’s guilty of nothing more than downloading some files without permission, and we were pleased (though not surprised) to see QuestionCopyright.org board member James Jacobs quoted saying what needs to be said: “Aaron’s prosecution undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles. It’s incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library.”
But beyond the disturbing fact of the arrest itself is a persistent problem in coverage of the case. Venue after venue refers to Swartz being arrested for “theft” or “stealing”, even though he didn’t steal anything. The bias isn’t particularly subtle:
Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old who went from helping to create Reddit to embracing a different brand of progressive activism, has been indicted on federal charges of breaking into MIT and stealing more than four million articles from an online database.
That’s from Talking Points Memo, a political news site (boldface ours). But often the bias starts in the headline:
…well, what’s depressing is how much longer we could continue the list. The “theft” paradigm is still the primary frame journalists use to analyze stories like this. Even venues not particularly hostile to Aaron’s cause unconsciously adopt the copying-is-stealing frame when reporting on such cases. For example, here’s a revealing passage from the Huffington Post:
… A spokeswoman for JSTOR said Tuesday that Swartz had agreed to return all the articles so the company can ensure they aren’t distributed.
“We don’t own any of this content. We really have to [be] responsible stewards of it,” said spokeswoman Heidi McGregor. “We worked hard to find out what was going on. We worked hard to get the data back.” …
“Return all the articles”? “Get the data back”? As if it were somehow… missing? It’s right there on JSTOR’s servers. It never left. JSTOR’s computers made copies of it and sent those copies to Aaron’s computers over a network.
Let’s review what the indictment actually alleges:
The claim is that Aaron Swartz downloaded more articles than he was authorized to from an online service, and that he used some networking tricks to prevent the service from noticing the volume and thus blocking the downloads.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
He didn’t “hack” into JSTOR’s servers, in the sense of triggering lurking software vulnerabilities that could do actual damage to the servers. He certainly didn’t “steal” anything — in fact, there is no evidence that he even redistributed the articles to others (not that there should be anything wrong with it if he had, and of course it still wouldn’t be stealing even then). He apparently just used the data for research into the funding behind authors of journal articles.
But to read coverage of the case, you’d think he had broken into someone’s house and taken their pets.
I’d love some ideas for how we can get journalists and commentators to cover these cases accurately. Would 4.8 million letters to the editor do it?
Any German speakers out there want to subtitle this short video by Nina Paley? In it, she tells, in English, how her film Sita Sings the Blues is currently being censored on YouTube Germany by GEMA, the German copyright collection agency (the ominous underworld connotations are unfortunately rather too appropriate in this case…).
EDIT July 15, 2011: Big Thank You to Cristobal for these subtitles!
We’d like to get this message wider circulation in Germany. We’d also appreciate it if GEMA and YouTube Germany would fix whatever misunderstanding caused them to censor the film in the first place! But since this surely isn’t the only film that this has happened to, it’s still important to spread the message that copyright restrictions inevitably result in censorship.
Note that we have already tried the official YouTube takedown counternotice procedure. It has resulted in exactly zero change: the film remains censored on YouTube Germany.
EDIT July 18, 2011: Hurray! Sita Sings The Blues is now, once again, viewable on German Youtube! Thanks to everyone who spread the word and got the story covered in outlets such as Der Spiegel. To learn more about the film, click on the Sita Distribution button at the top of this page.
Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
These are the Four Freedoms of Free Software. They are foundational principles, and they are exactly right. They have served and continue to serve the Free Software Movement very well. They place the user’s freedom ahead of all other concerns. Free Software is a principled movement, but Free Culture is not – at least not so far. Why?
1. The No Derivatives (-ND) Restriction
If you tinker with software, you can improve it. You can also break it or make it worse, but the Freedom to Tinker is one of the foundational 4 Freedoms of Free Software. Your software may also be used for purposes you don’t like, used by “bad people,” or even used against you; the Four Freedoms wisely counsel us to GET OVER IT.
Unfortunately, The Free Software Foundation does not extend “Freedom to Tinker” to Culture:
Cultural works released by the Free Software Foundation come with “No Derivatives” restrictions. They rationalize it here:
Works that express someone’s opinion—memoirs, editorials, and so on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for practical use like software and documentation. Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different set of permissions (notice how users are now called “recipients,” and their Freedoms are now called “permissions” –NP): just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim. (link)
The problem with this is that it is dead wrong. You do not know what purposes your works might serve others. You do not know how works might be found “practical” by others. To claim to understand the limits of “utility” of cultural works betrays an irrational bias toward software and against all other creative work. It is anti-Art, valuing software above the rest of culture. It says coders alone are entitled to Freedom, but everyone else can suck it. Use of -ND restrictions is an unjustifiable infringement on the freedom of others.
For example, here I have violated the Free Software Foundation’s No-Derivatives license:
The Four Freedoms of Free Culture:
1. The freedom to run, view, hear, read, play, perform, or otherwise attend to the Work;
2. The freedom to study, analyze, and dissect copies of the Work, and adapt it to your needs;
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. (link)
Without permission, I’ve created a derivative work: the Four Freedoms of Free Culture. Although I violated FSF’s No-Derivatives license, they violated Freedoms # 2 and 4, so we’re even.
1. The Non-Commercial (-NC) Restriction
The Freedom to Distribute Free Software is essential to its success. It has given rise to many for-profit businesses that benefit the larger community.
Red Hat, Canonical – would the world be better if such companies were forbidden? Would Free Software benefit from a ban on those businesses?
Yet the Cultural ecosystem is stunted by the prevalence of Non-Commercial restrictions. These maintain commercial monopolies around works, and – especially for vocational artists like me – are functionally as restrictive as unmodified copyright. Yet they are widely mislabeled “Free Culture,” or even “Copyleft.”
Which of these things does not belong?
This is a still from the mostly excellent and popular documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. This film is many peoples’ introduction to the term “Free Culture” and “Copyleft.” But as you can see, the Non-Commercial restriction is lumped in with actual Free license terms.
See that dollar sign with the slash in it? That means Non-Commercial restrictions, which are most definitely NOT Copyleft. (I’ve posted about Creative Commons’ branding confusion before, but it’s only gotten worse since then.)
NC stands for Not Copyleft
This film is itself licensed under unFree Non-Commercial restrictions. As an artist and filmmaker, I have found confusion is rampant among my creative colleagues. Some filmmakers are beginning to think the term “Free Culture” is cool, but they still want to restrict others’ freedom and impose commercial monopolies on their works.
This doesn’t help either
The book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig its itself not Free culure, but it is widely looked up to. It sets an unfortunate and confusing example with its Non-Commercial license. It illustrates the absence of guiding principles in the Free Culture movement.
I have spoken to many artists who insist there’s “no real difference” between Non-Commercial licenses and Free alternatives. Yet these differences are well known and unacceptable in Free Software, for good reason.
Calling Non-Commercial restrictions “Free Culture” neuters what could be an effective movement, if it only had principles.
So what do I want?
I want a PRINCIPLED Free Culture Movement.
I want Free Software people to take Culture seriously. I want a Free Culture movement guided by principles of Freedom, just as the Free Software movement is guided by principles of Freedom. I want a name I can use that means something – the phrase “Free Culture” is increasingly meaningless, as it is often applied to unFree practices, and is also the name of a famous book that is itself encumbered with Non-Commercial restrictions.
I want a Free Culture ecosystem that allows artists to make money. I want anyone to be able to accept money for their work of remixing and building on Culture – just as a trucker can accept money for driving on a road. I want money to be among the many incentives to participate in building culture. Without the freedoms to Tinker and Redistribute without restriction, there is little incentive to build on and improve cultural works. There is little reward to help your neighbor, when you are guaranteed to lose money doing so. “Free Culture” with non-Commercial restrictions will remain a hobby for those with a surplus of time and labor, and those who only accept money from monopolists.
I want commerce without monopolies. I want people to understand the difference.
I want a Free Culture ecosystem that includes equivalents of businesses like Red Hat and Canonical. I want cultural businesses that give back to their communities, that work with their customers instead of against them. Only if we refuse to place Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives restrictions on our works will a robust Free Culture ecosystem be able to emerge.
I want the Free Software community – those who currently best understand the Four Freedoms – to champion the rest of Culture, not just Software. I want Freedom for All.
High-res versions, song, and stills available for download at archive.org. (The direct YouTube page is here.)
LYRICS: Always give credit where credit is due if you didn’t write it, don’t say it’s by you just copy the credit along with the work or else you’ll come off as an arrogant jerk
Always give credit where credit belongs we know that you didn’t write Beethoven’s songs pretending you did makes you look like a fool unless you’re Beethoven – in that case, it’s cool
A transparent system makes cheating unwise the simplest web search exposes your lies no one wants their reputation besmirched which happens to liars when they are web-searched
Proper citation will make you a star it shows that you know that we know who you are Plagiarization will only harm you so always give credit where credit is due!
Synopsis: Mimi makes a copy of a Beethoven Symphony with a giant copy machine. Trouble starts when Eunice erases Beethoven’s name and writes in her own. This makes Eunice look like an ass. Searching the Internet (itself a giant copy machine) confirms that Eunice is a liar. Eunice realizes her mistake and corrects it, but by then everyone’s moved on – her plagiarism is barely a blip in the spread of correctly-attributed cultural works through copying.
Explanation:
Whenever I speak about Free Culture at schools, I’m asked “what about plagiarism?” Copying and plagiarism are two quite different things. As Mimi demonstrates with the giant Copy Machine, copying a work means copying its attribution too:
just copy the credit along with the work
When people copy songs and movies, they don’t change the authors’ names. Plagiarism is something else: it’s lying. If Copyright has anything to do with plagiarism, it’s that it makes it easier to plagiarize (because works and their provenance aren’t public and are therefore easier to obscure and lie about) and increases incentive to do so (because copying with attribution is as illegal as copying without, and including attribution makes the infringement more conspicuous). American Copyright law does not protect attribution to begin with; it is concerned only with “ownership,” not authorship. Many artists sign their attributions away with the “rights” they sell, which is why it can be difficult to know which artists contributed to corporate works.
I chose Beethoven to illustrate how copyright has nothing to do with preventing plagiarism. All Beethoven’s work is in the Public Domain. Legally, you can take Ludwig van Beethoven’s songs, Jane Austen‘s novels, or Eadweard Muybridge‘s photographs and put any name you want on them. Go ahead! You’re at no risk of legal action. Your reputation may suffer, however, and you definitely won’t be fooling anyone. If anyone has doubts, they can use that same copy machine – the Internet – to sort out who authored what. Lying is very difficult in a public, transparent system. A good analog to this is public encryption keys: their security comes from their publicity.
The song says “always give credit where credit is due,” but in many cases credit is NOT due. For example, how many credits should be at the end of this film? I devoted about two and a half seconds to these credits:
Movie and Song by Nina Paley Vocals by Bliss Blood
But I could have credited far more. In fact, the credits could take longer than the movie. Here are some more credits:
Ukelele: Bliss Blood Guitar: Al Street Recorded by Bliss Blood and Al Street
What about sound effects? Were it not for duration constraints, this would be in the movie:
Every single sound effect in the cartoon was made by someone. Should I credit each one? Crash-wobble by (Name of Foley Artist Here). Cartoon zip-run by (Name of Other Foley Artist Here). And so on: dozens of sound effects were used in the cartoon, and each one had an author. What about the little noises Mimi & Eunice make? Not only could the recording engineer be credited, but the voice actor as well (as far as I know, these were both Greg Sextro).
I included a few seconds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the end, which I didn’t credit in the movie. Should I have? Why or why not?
I could credit the characters:
Starring: Mimi Eunice & Special Guest Appearance by Ludwig van Beethoven
I could be more detailed in crediting myself:
Lyrics and Melody by Nina Paley Character design: Nina Paley Animation: Nina Paley Produced by Nina Paley Directed by Nina Paley Edited by Nina Paley Backgrounds by Nina Paley Color design by Nina Paley Layout: Nina Paley Based on the comic strip “Mimi & Eunice” by Nina Paley
I didn’t even make a card for the Minute Memes logo. Should that be in there?
I used a Public Domain painting of Beethoven for the Beethoven character, which is by Joseph Karl Stieler. Who photographed the painting? Who digitized the photograph? Is credit due here?
The ass drawing also came from Wikimedia Commons, where it’s credited to Pearson Scott Foresman. But who actually drew it? I have no idea. I doubt that Pearson Scott Foresman could even legally claim the copyright on it to “donate” to Wikimedia in the first place, but there they are, getting credit for it instead of an artist. That’s because copyright is only concerned with “ownership,” not authorship.
Then there’s the software I used, good old pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash. Should I credit the software? What about the programmers who contributed to the software? I also used a Macintosh computer (I know, I know, when Free Software and Open Hardware come close to doing what my old system does, I’ll be the first to embrace it) and a Wacom Cintiq pen monitor. How many people deserve credit for these in my movie?
Mimi and Eunice themselves were “inspired” by many historical cartoons. Early Disney and Fleischer animations, the “rubber hose” style, Peanuts, this recent cartoon, and countless other sources I don’t even know the names of – but would be compelled to find out, if credit were in fact due. Is it?
And so on. It is possible to attribute ad absurdum. So where is credit due? It’s complicated, the rules are changing, and standards are determined organically by communities, not laws. I had to edit the song for brevity, but I kind of wish I hadn’t excised this line:
A citation shows us where we can get more of all the good culture that Free Culture’s for
Attribution is a way to help your neighbor. You share not only the work, but information about the work that helps them pursue their own research and maybe find more works to enjoy. How much one is expected to help their neighbor is determined by (often unspoken) community standards. People who don’t help their neighbors tend to be disliked. And those who go out of their way to deceive and defraud their neighbors – i.e. plagiarists – are hated and shunned. Plagiarism doesn’t affect works – works don’t have feelings, and what is done to one copy has no effect on other copies. Plagiarism affects communities, and it is consideration for such that determines where attribution is appropriate.
At least that’s the best I can come up with right now. Attribution is actually a very complicated concept; if you have more ideas about it, please share.
Why should you Free your work? To make it as easy as possible for people to share your work — as easy as possible for your work to reach eyeballs and ears and minds — to reach an audience. And to make it as easy as possible for audience support — including money — to reach you.
Forms of audience support include:
Money – Audiences want to support artists they like. A “Donate” button gives them an easy mechanism to do so. Audiences buy merchandise from artists they like for the same reason. Give them a “Reason to Buy” and they will.
Work – some fans can make web sites, sell merchandise at concerts, help with promotions, etc. If you need help, ask your audience first. No one is more motivated to help you than your true fans.
Promotions – word of mouth recommendations are the most effective form of promotion, and audiences do this without coercion if they like a work.
Distribution – often called “piracy,” this is an extremely valuable service. Distribution without audience assistance is expensive: imagine if you had to pay for every copy of your work (as in paying for a print run of paper books, or plastic discs), and then store and distribute them to every potential audient. Want 1,000 people to hear your song? Imagine if you had to pay at least $1,000 up front for even the chance – not including costs of storage and shipping. You can then of course charge them for the privilege of hearing your song, by selling them discs – but this cost barrier makes it even less likely they’ll want to hear it. When the audience distributes your work for you, they bear the costs of making and sharing copies, not you. Audience Distribution costs you nothing.
Archiving – the cost of privately archiving your own work is very high; fans do it for free. The Freer the work is, the more robust its archives will be, especially as technologies and formats change. CDs and DVDs may become obsolete, but fans migrate works from one format to the next, ensuring they’re always accessible and up to date. Example: copy-restricted films are distintegrating in cans. Digitizing them is expensive; digitizing them without permission is too risky to invest in. Without audience help, these costs must be borne exclusively by the “copyright holder.” Digital archive formats are notoriously unstable; many hard drives from even ten years ago are incompatible with today’s technology. Video codecs change rapidly, and no one knows which codecs will remain in use, and which will become obsolete. A private rightsholder must continually research what new formats are evolving, and make sure to migrate their archives. They are still likely to miss some format changes; it’s very hard for a single entity to stay abreast of every diverse technological innovation. Analog formats are safer, as they don’t change as rapidly, but 35mm film archiving is extraordinarily expensive. The negative must be transferred to archival films, then stored in a secure facility. If anything happens to that facility, or rents aren’t paid, the archive is lost. In contrast, Free Culture opens the possibility of the most robust, decentralized, up-to-date archiving system ever: the audience and all their devices.
Copy restrictions place a barrier between you, the artist, and most forms of support. By removing the barriers of copyright, you make it possible to receive money and other kinds of support from your audience, both directly and through distributors, thereby increasing your chances of success.
There are countless ways to make a web site, from hiring professional designers and technologists, to getting a free blog. Assuming you’re broke and have no tech skills, here’s the easiest way to do the latter:
That’s it. Your own web site, free, with loads of templates to choose from and lots of help from wordpress. That’s all you need! You can certainly get more advanced from there, but that will require more skills, time, and/or money. A free WordPress blog is more than enough to get started.
Get PayPal, Flattr accounts. Place “donate” and “Flattr” buttons on web site.
In addition to PayPal, you can also get a Flattr account. Flattr combines a donations system with social networking to create a hybrid that’s both fun and hard to explain. Visit Flattr.com for more information.
A Free License is legal language that sits on top of copyright. In our current copyright regime, everything is copyrighted whether you want it to be or not. What I’m writing here is copyrighted, even though I don’t want it to be. There is currently no way to “opt out” of copyright. All I can do is attach a “Free License” to the work, that grants users some of the fredoms that copyright automatically takes away.
A Free License guarantees the Four Freedoms of Free Culture:
1. The freedom to view, hear, read, or otherwise attend to the Work; 2. The freedom to study, analyze, and dissect copies of the Work, and adapt it to your needs; 3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; 4. The freedom to improve the Work, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits
Creative Commons is the most famous brand of Free licenses, however most Creative Commons licenses are not Free! Just because a license is branded Creative Commons does not mean it’s free. In fact most Creative Commons licenses have restrictions that are incompatible with Free Culture.
If you see the letters -NC or -ND anywhere in a Creative Commons license, it is not a Free license. Be careful – use only one of the above Creative Commons licenses, otherwise your work will not be Free and you may alienate those fans who could help you the most.
Because all licenses ride on top of copyright, they can be seen as validating or extending the reach of Copyright law. For those who are totally fed up with existing laws and the interference of lawyers in the cultural sphere, a “non-license” may be preferable. Non-licenses are not licenses, they are statements of intention: that the artist wants their work to be copied. They don’t ride on top of any existing laws, and attempt to avoid law (and the state force that backs it up) altogether.
Our favorite un-license is the Copyheart, which looks like this:
But there are others, like Kopimi, and of course you can write your own!
Whether you use a lawyer-approved Free License or a non-license, it’s crucial to let your audience know they are Free to copy, share, and build on your work. While it’s tempting to ignore copyright altogether, your audience can’t know your work is Free unless you tell them. Try to include either a notice of Free license (i.e. “CC-BY-SA”) or a Copyheart message (“♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share“) wherever you post your work.
When you upload a work to archive.org, you will see a dialog page like this:
Fill out the fields (unlike this example, you should include a link to your web site in the “description” box!), then click “choose a license.” Archive.org lets you attach both Free and un-Free Creative Commons licenses to uploaded works. It is very important you specify a FREE license during the upload process.
Archive.org does not let you specify licenses by name; instead they give you a dialog box and ask you to check options. To specify a Free License, you must choose either CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, or CC-0.
To specify CC-BY-SA, check the options as follows: Allow commercial uses of your work? YES Allow modifications of your work? YES, as long as others share alike
To specify CC-BY, check the options as follows: Allow commercial uses of your work? YES Allow modifications of your work? YES
You want your work to be as easy and convenient to copy as possible. A text is likelier to be read if it’s formatted for existing browsers and eReaders. A song is likelier to be used in films, videos, dances and remix projects if it’s available in high quality .wav; it’s likelier to be shared by fans as an .mp3 or .ogg. Images are most easily shared on web sites as low resolution jpegs and .pngs, but they can have far more applications as vector files (.svg, .eps) and high resolution TIFFs. Ideally, release your work in as many formats as possible.
But how do you do that? Reformatting can be a real pain, and how do you even know what file formats your audience wants?
This is where fans come in. Ask your fans for help – even if you only have one fan, or a small handful. Release a master file and ask them to convert to other formats. If you’re a musician, upload an uncompressed .wav file of a song on archive.org. Then ask fans convert it to .mp3, .ogg, and other formats and repost those on archive.org, as well as everywhere else they can share the files.
Once fans know you’re releasing your work under free licenses, they may convert your files to more useable formats as a matter of course. In addition to providing a valuable service, this work strengthens the bond between fan and artist; what Mike Masnick calls “CwF” (“Connect with Fans.”)
If work is a video, upload it to Youtube and Vimeo in addition to Archive.org. Include links to archive.org page and your own web site in “description” field (see example). Embed the video on your own site.
PROMOTE. Tell all your fans. Ask them to spread the word. If you have Twitter, Facebook, and other social network accounts, post that your work is up and Freely available. Make sure to name the specific license (ie, CC-BY-SA, not “Creative Commons”), so they KNOW it’s Free. Include link to your web site.
The Internet isn’t for everyone. Not everyone wants to spend time on FaceBook, or Twitter; not everyone “gets” them. Not everyone wants to blog, or email, or whatever the kids are doing these days. One solution is to force yourself to learn how to use these tools, but there is another option: ASK YOUR FANS TO DO IT FOR YOU.
If you’re a musician who gives live concerts, ask for “social media” volunteers at your next performance. If you’re an artist who dislikes the Internet, but goes to openings and parties and networking events in Real Life, put the word out among your friends, fans, and patrons. If you teach, let your students know you’re looking for help. Others can take care of online promotion for you – if you let them. The best way to let them is to give them a stake in your art, and not try to control them. Once again, Freeing your work is the key to receiving this service. Then fans aren’t doing work for you, they’re doing work with you. As long as you place copy restrictions on your work, fans will feel exploited. By Freeing your work, you and your fans are on the same team.
If you have something to sell in connection with the work (DVDs, CDs, T-shirts, Keychains, services, custom commissions, etc.) make these available when you release the work. If you have an online store, link to it. If you’re a performer, bring items to your performances and have a volunteer sell them for you. Let people know they can purchase said merchandise at your shows.
Just because your content is Free, doesn’t mean you can’t sell “containers” of it: paper books, discs, hard drives, prints, paintings, and so on. One successful example of this principle in action is my own “Sita Sings the Blues” e-store. Authors whose ebooks are available for free sell more paper copies (see Paulo Coelho). The more content (which is non-ravalrous) circulates freely, the greater demand for rivalrous goods related to it. Which you or your agents can sell.
Related, but not exactly the same as ours,is Techdirt.com‘s basic business model for artists: CwF+RtB (Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$). You can read numerous ways this principle is making artists money in Techdirt’s Case Studies. Although Free works aren’t a prerequisite for this model, they work perfectly with it.
Let go. There is no time limit; once your work is Free, it can be discovered and “catch on” at any time. There are no guarantees of success in the arts. You’ve done your part: you’ve removed one large obstacle, by removing copy restrictions. The rest is up the the wider world. Now is a good time to think about your next piece of art!
By putting your work out there. Make the art you want to see, and share it. Be patient. It may take a while. The most important thing you can do at this stage is focus on your art, making the art you want to make, and Freeing it to the best of your ability so that others, sooner or later, can find it and share it with the next potential fan.
“Ivan Tsarevitch” from Morevna Project: I suppose you could call this “programmer art” since the artist is also one of the main developers of Synfig Studio (Konstantin Dmitriev | www.morevnaproject.org / CC-By-SA 3.0)
We need to change the words we use for serious free culture artists. I suggest “vocational“: “a vocational work”, “a vocational artist”, “artists who show vocationalism in their work”.
I thought about this as I was considering Nina Paley’s story about trying to submit some of her own (very much “vocational” and also “professional”) work to the Wikimedia Commons — only to be disbelieved on the basis that her work was of too high a quality! This concept of “professional” versus “amateur” work has bothered me for a long time. Partly this may be because I often seem to be stuck in between: am I a professional writer or an amateur one? I get paid to write for Free Software Magazine, but I don’t get paid very much, and I don’t get paid at all to write for Question Copyright. But both tasks are very much a part of my vocation as a writer and as a free culture advocate. I expect to be judged on the same scale as any professional.
Another objection is that the stigma of “amateurishness” is sometimes assigned to free culture art. People speak snidely of “programmer art” (though of course, a few programmers are quite good artists, and vice-versa). I honestly believe that some artists hold back from freeing their work not because they are really worried about remuneration, but because they fear that releasing it for free will somehow cheapen the work (or them) by making it “unprofessional” or “amateur”.
Of course, I’m bothered by that idea in itself. There’s something a little dirty about the fact that we have so elevated commerce that we now implicitly place professional work (made for money) above amateur work (made for love). Surely there ought to be something a little more holy about work gifted to the world out of an artist’s spiritual need than out of their need to pay the rent? (Not that paying the rent isn’t important, but there ought to be some respect for the long perspective).
“Professional” is often used incorrectly to imply a certain level of skill. But in fact, many works made for money lack such skill, and many skilled works are not done for money (some would say all the best works are done for love, and money is an afterthought).
“Amateur” is literally someone who works out of their love for the subject. And frequently amateur work is superior to professional work in the same field. But over time, perhaps due to some intentional marketing by vested interests, the term “amateur” has acquired a patina of disrespect as in “This work is amateurish”.
There is also another problem with “amateur” — it makes you feel like a total pig for criticizing the work seriously. Many people post amateur (and “amateurish”) work on the web hoping for encouragement. For them it’s just fun, and they want to have a peer group support them. They don’t want to take the work seriously, nor do they want to receive serious criticism (whether constructive or not). They don’t want to compete in the same league as professional artists, and that’s why they are publishing “amateur” work.
But then there are others, who do want to take their work seriously; who won’t get their feelings hurt by an honest appraisal; who are striving for their work to be just as good as any work out there — professional or amateur. What do we call that?
Some people — especially lawyers — like to refer to vocational (but amateur) work as “pro bono“. Which is fine, if you like Latin phrases, and of course I know that it really means “for the good” as in “for the public good”. But I have to confess it always makes me think “for the sake of [Sonny] Bono”, which, given that his name has become almost synonymous with the Copyright Term Extension Act always causes me some cognitive dissonance. Perhaps that’s silly. But a more reasonable objection is simply that most people who aren’t lawyers don’t know Latin very well. For me, it also carries the stigma of conditionalism: “pro bono” work is work that “ought” to be done for money, but is done for free under some special exemption — and I’d better be careful not to violate the terms of that exemption or they’re going to start charging.
“Semi-professional” and “serious amateur” are the terms I’ve used in the past, but I don’t like them. Both suggest some kind of fence-straddling incompleteness.
Concept art (a “model sheet”) for a character from Morevna Project, created by Eleonora Pala. As far as I know, all of her contributions are so far unpaid (Eleonora Pala | www.morevnaproject.org / CC By-SA 3.0)
And both of these words are still putting the emphasis on whether you get paid and how much you get paid for doing the work. Many artists would say that is totally beside the point, and I agree.
“Vocational” is a term which is sometimes associated with professional work, but also with unpaid work. What it really means is that the work is central to your life — that you take it seriously and intend to excel at it. In other words, it truly puts the emphasis on your commitment, and not whether your interest is pecuniary or not.
I’m a little bothered by the association with “vocational school” which, when opposed to college, implies a kind of intellectual lowness which some might object to. But there is also the idea of “vocations” which is the term used when people are driven to a task by religious or charitable motivations, that imparts a kind of spiritual uplift — something I believe is a part of many free culture artists’ worldview (i.e. they do what they do, at least partly, because they believe the world will be better for it).
Of course many vocational artists are also professional artists. Many are amateurs. The idea is to stop splitting them up on the basis of whether they get paid, but instead on whether they apply themselves to the work seriously.
I’m thinking of adopting this word “vocational” as the proper term of art in my own writing for artists who contribute to free culture works on a serious level. Perhaps it’ll catch on.
QCO Artist in Residence and Free Culture’s favorite cartoonist, Nina Paley, will be presenting at this year’s OKCon, the Open Knowledge Conference, in Berlin, Germany. Nina’s talk will focus on her personal story of freeing her artwork and the resultant flourishing of her life and career. She will also devote time to talking about non-commercial restrictions in popular licenses that purport to be Free Culture.
The talk will take place on July 1st 2011 at 16:00 in the Main Track space. Click here for more information about Nina, her talk, and OKCon .
What is free culture?
more than downloading some files without permission, and we were pleased (though not surprised) to see QuestionCopyright.org board member James Jacobs 
