[nettime-see] Re: [spectre] IHT on Lessig at WOS3, Berlin, June 10-12, 2004

[zeljko blace <zblace@mi2.hr>]

Inke Arns wrote:

>New copyright grants artists greater license
>By Jennifer L. Schenker (IHT)
>Monday, June 14, 2004
>
>
>An alternative copyright that allows authors and artists to give away
>their work while retaining some commercial rights is being adapted 
>for use across Europe and beyond.
>
>Lawyers, musicians and filmmakers gathered in Berlin on Friday for 
>the German introduction of the licenses, which were first drafted for 
>use in the United States in 2001 by Creative Commons, a Silicon 
>Valley nonprofit organization. The German debut followed the 
>introduction of Creative Commons licenses in Japan in March, in 
>Finland in May and in Brazil on June 4.
>
>Some 60 countries are expected to adapt Creative Commons licenses to
>their jurisdiction, "and Germany is a critical part of that process,"
>said Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University law professor who is 
>the chairman and co-founder of Creative Commons.
>
>Creative Commons licenses will be introduced in the Netherlands next
>Friday and in France by the end of the summer, with a goal of 
>creating licenses for all EU countries by year-end, Lessig said in an 
>interview by phone last week.
>
>The idea behind Creative Commons licenses is to give musicians the
>freedom to release their work to people who want to disseminate it or
>to remix the music and try something new, Lessig said. Artists choose
>how they want to share the work, specifying whether they want credit
>for reuse, whether they want to be paid for commercial use or whether
>it is acceptable to change it.
>
>"This is a different way of spreading or building upon musical 
>works," Lessig said.
>
>Lessig, who says that copyright and patent law is too restrictive, is
>the author of "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the 
>Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity," which he has made
>available on the Internet for free. The bound version from Penguin
>Press costs $24.95. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court
>against extending the length of time that copyrights cover original
>works, a period that lasts 95 years in the United States, and is an
>advocate of open-source software, which is distributed freely on the
>Internet.
>
>Businesses that own the rights or sell software, however, argue that
>copyrights and patents reward creative and inventive people for their
>talents and compensate companies that hire and promote them. The ease
>with which digitized music and other digital files are shared on the
>Internet has given the intellectual arguments new importance.
>
>Björn Hartmann, a German disc jockey and creator of the online music
>label textone.org, which releases free music, said that while he
>believed Europe's independent musicians and those with small or 
>online labels would benefit from Creative Commons licenses, most 
>established performing artists and composers in Germany would not, at 
>least for now.
>
>The German introduction of Creative Commons licenses, which Lessig
>acknowledged was the "most difficult to date," is complicated by 
>rules in Germany that require musicians to give up rights to their 
>work when they sign up with agencies that collect royalties on their 
>behalf.
>
>The license has been adapted to take German copyright law into
>account, requiring changes in things such as the definitions of terms
>and the extent to which a work can be modified, said Till Jäger, a
>German lawyer who helped adapt the license for Germany.
>
>But many performing artists in Germany sign up with a specialized
>local royalty collection agency called the German Phono Association,
>and give up some of their rights when they do so. And most composers
>or songwriters sign up with another royalty collection agency, called
>the German Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction
>Rights, and allow it to negotiate on their behalf, Jäger said.
>
>While performers and composers who have signed up with collection
>agencies cannot opt for a Creative Commons license because they no
>longer hold the rights to their own works, Christiane Asschenfeldt,
>the international coordinator for Creative Commons, said discussions
>have begun with the Society for Musical Performing and Reproduction
>Rights to work out a solution.
>
>Society officials were not available for comment on Friday.
>
>When composers sign up with the society, they sign over the rights 
>not only to a particular work but to all works in their repertoire, 
>past, present and future, said Thomas Dreier, a professor at the 
>University of Karlsruhe's Information Law Institute in Germany, who 
>helped draft the German implementation of the Creative Commons 
>license.
>
>Meanwhile, independent musicians in Germany as well as others -
>including writers, filmmakers, scientists and photographers - can
>elect to use the Creative Commons license.
>
>Eight of the institutes that are part of the Max Planck Society for
>the Advancement of the Sciences, Germany's leading organization for
>basic scientific research, will be among the first to use the 
>Creative Commons license, Asschenfeldt said. Scientists will use the 
>Creative Commons license as a way of publicly disseminating research 
>while reserving some but not all rights.
>
>European Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative sponsored by the
>European Commission that involves three of the Max Planck institutes
>and 13 other European partners, has also said it wants a Creative
>Commons license, she said.
>
>International Herald Tribune
>
>
>
>Inke Arns
>http://www.v2.nl/~arns
>
>
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