> I disagree entirely with your hypothetical link between cost of > creative production and the freedoms that should be awarded to > society. Copyright and trademark law were specifically designed to > give away a little bit of societal freedom in exchange for stimulated > creativity.
I agree with all of this. Society would benefit from hugely from re-use now digital tech means it can do so widely and (more or less) equitably. Understand where I'm coming from. I'm against glib absolutism, not re-use. And one hard lesson I learned from Creative Archive's failure is that *blanket* insistance upon re-use - or even unrestricted global use - for all works future, present and past *can* mean art isn't made in the first place, or isn't placed in the public domian. If you'd have said to the makers of Cathy Come Home "Oh, and by the way, anyone will have the right to do what they want with your work" it would not have been made. And today, insistance on global re-use would mean it remained gathering dust in the BBC's archive. It takes patience, time and - most importantly - evidence to demostrate that re-use can be a good thing for all concerned. >At no point is "cost of creative production" mentioned nor > should it enter the discussion. Hmm. You don't stimulate much creativity if said stimulation does not cover the costs of production. > The job of our government is to protect the the public, not the > private entities that expend "creative effort". It is not the public > who are "freeloaders" when they ask for freedom to use, reuse and > modify - it is the "creatives" who are asking/expecting too much from > society. Rights are a balance - as you say - between societal freedom and creative stimulation. I'd argue that both sides of that equation stand to gain from re-use now media is going digital and the cost of copying, sharing and re-using is tending towards zero. But you don't help rebalance laws by jumping up and down on one end proclaiming your own sacred manifesto to be The One True Word and decrying those nasty private entities at the other end to be ripping off society. It's such dogma which gets you described by otherwise pretty measured civil servants and MPs as 'The Copyleft Taliban' and does the cause of changing the law to enable and encourage re-use nothing but harm. The name of the game is to provide evidence of the benefits of re-use. I'm pretty encouraged that the Treasury is now getting an independent economist to look at the the case for re-use of Government data off the back of the Power of Information Review. It was that sober review, full of case studies and real-life examples of the benefits of re-use that lead to this change of heart. I guess I'm just bored of placard waving. I want to see stuff actually change. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
