Brought To You By The Letter C:
Copyright and Creative Commons
When it comes to music, the big C
doesn’t stand for cancer, but copyright.
Copyright is the reason downloading music illegally is a crime. Somebody was nice enough to give it a cool
name, piracy, yarrr matey, but it’s still a crime. On the surface Copyright law makes a bunch of
sense. It’s way to incent people to be
creative, and reward them for their work.
The founding fathers agreed that a reward system was needed, to incent creation,
but also understood that the system could go too far and end up stymying
innovation. What they also realized is
that creativity often relies on use, criticism, supplementation and
consideration of previous works. Thus
they believed that copyright law should be structured in a way that would give
authors a monopoly just long enough to create more (Vaidhyanathan, n.d.). It was with this in mind that the original
copyright law was good for one term of 14 years, and you could apply for a
second term if you felt it was warranted.
After that the works entered the public domain.
What is the public domain you ask? Basically, once a work’s copyright has
expired, or the author has designated it public domain, the work becomes free
to reproduce in any form, whether you’re talking about just a plain copy, or
turning a book into a movie, or writing a new book based on the characters,
covering a song, or using a sample from the song to create a new one. In other words, free to all, and in the words
of F'n' Lou from Fight Club, “aint that something.”
And it is. The problem is the laws have changed
drastically since the countries inception.
Now a copyright is good for the life of the Author plus 70 years, or if
the work was commission by a corporation, 95 years (“How long does copy protection
last?” 2010). What this means, is less
and less things are hitting the public domain, which in turn means there is less clay for us
to mold new works.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The digerati have come up with a system that
allows more open sharing of works with in the current system. This is called Creative Commons. The way Creative Commons works, is it allows
creators to assign shareable rights to their work. Meaning you can allow your work to be used if
credit is given to you. You allow your
work to be used if it’s not used for commercial purposes. You can also choose whether you will allow
people to alter your work, or if you only want it to be used verbatim.
You may ask yourself, why would I go
through the trouble of sharing work in this way? The reason is it helps supplement the
material that is no longer flowing into the public domain. It also allows for a more collaborative environment. It allows your work to live on past its
original use. Wouldn’t it be cool if you
produced a song, and found it was used in a student film, or a sample of it was
used in somebody else’s song? These are
the sort of things that can happen when using Creative Commons.
Still a bit foggy on the concept,
below are a couple of You Tube clips that do an excellent job of explaining
Creative Commons.
Creative Commons Website: http://creativecommons.org/
References
How long does
copyright protection last? (2010, March
10). Retrieved from
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html.
