EMAIL TO TED WEINSTEIN AND THE REST OF THE BAY AREA AGENTS
NOTE TO SELF: "DANDELION SEEDS" A MORE APT COMPARISON THAN "SPAGHETTI ON WALL?"
Ted, Something for the agents... An interesting letter from Author Cory Doctorow endorsing creative commons. Creative commons (a bay area sensation founded by Larry Lessig that has spread to the corners of the internet) acts like a looser version of the standard copyright, but is actually a license to use/reproduce work for non-commercial purposes.
To some extent, the copyright laws make illegal activities that are looked at as OK in the context of a modern day song, a viral video, and generally half of the stuff occurring on line (for example this email in which I publish in its entirity a "work" that is not mine).
Do agents (and authors and publishers) win or lose with this new wave? I'm not sure either will occur if one reviews every trendy license they are signing.
If anyone has had negative or positive experiences with CC or the "new rules" of downloading, maybe they could share them or pose questions.
All best,
Rob
(THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS REPUBLISHED HERE WITH THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF CORY DOCTOROW AND IN THAT SENSE, THE CC LICENSE IS NOT IN USE. IF I WERE TO HAVE USED IT WITHOUT HIS PERMISSION, NOT IN COMMERCE BUT WITH THE KNOWLEDGE OF A CC LICENSE, THEN I WOULD HAVE USED IT ACCORDING TO THE TERMS OF THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE. IF YOU ARE DIZZY, KEEP READING)
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> Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:41:49 -0700
> From: larry@creativecommons.org
> To: cc-lessigletter@lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [cc-lessigletter] Commoner Letter #2 - Cory Doctorow
>
> Two weeks ago I sent you a letter from Evan Prodromou, who wrote to
> you about the power of collaboratively created Free culture and the
> role CC plays in enabling that culture to flourish. This week's letter
> comes to you from Cory Doctorow.
>
> ----------------------------------
>
> To the Commoners community, from Cory Doctorow:
>
> My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound
> together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
> (http://craphound.com/down/), was published by Tor, the largest
> science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few
> days after CC launched its first licenses. I was the first author to
> use the licenses, applying them to my book and releasing it for free
> online on the same day it appeared in stores. Today, the book has been
> through more printings than I can keep track of, been translated into
> more languages than I know, and has been downloaded more than 750,000
> times from my site alone (I don't know the total number of downloads,
> because, of course, anyone is free to redistribute it).
>
> I've applied Creative Commons licenses to all my books since,
> including the comics that IDW just adapted from six of my short
> stories. I use CC for my speeches, for my articles and op-eds, and for
> articles and stories that I write for "straight" magazines from Forbes
> to Radar. My co-editors and I use CC licenses for our popular blog,
> Boing Boing, one of the most widely read blogs in the world. These
> licenses have allowed my work to spread far and wide, into corners of
> the world I never could have reached. I hear from sailors on
> battleships, volunteers working in the developing world, kids in
> underfunded school-districts, and people who "don't usually read this
> sort of thing" but found my work because a friend was able to
> introduce them to it. My readers have made innumerable technical
> remixes, fan-fic installments, fan-art drawings, songs, translations
> and other fun and inspiring creative works from mine, each time
> humbling and inspiring me (and enriching me!).
>
> CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get
> passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader,
> turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their
> tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O'Reilly says, my
> problem is not piracy, it's obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books
> into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in
> every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a
> possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical
> copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a
> speech. I once sold a reprint of an article of mine to an editor who
> saw it in a spam message -- the spammer had pasted it into the "word
> salad" at the bottom of his boner-pill pitch to get past the filters.
> The editor read the piece, liked it, googled me, and sent me a check.
>
> CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain
> artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses
> give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done
> in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each
> other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era
> of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool's errand, and
> by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than
> damning it.
>
> Writers all over the world are adopting CC licenses, creating an
> artistic movement that treats copying as a feature, not a bug. As a
> science fiction writer, this is enormously satisfying: here we have
> artists who are acting as though they live in the future, not the
> past. CC is changing the world, making it safe for copying, and just
> in time, too.
>
>
> If you'd like to be spared these letters over then next three months,
> visit http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe
>
> ----------------------------------
>
> This email is part of a bi-weekly series of letters written by members
> of the Creative Commons community. If you would like to be removed
> from this list, please click here:
> http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe
>
> Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting,
> please recommend they sign up at
> http://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter
>
> Support the Commons
> http://support.creativecommons.org
>
> To link to this message, go to:
> http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7774
>
> Archive of Lessig Letters
> http://support.creativecommons.org/letters
>
> Learn about CC, including comics and movies
> http://creativecommons.org/learnmore
THIS MESSAGE IS THE COPYRIGHT IN CREATIVE COMMONS OF CORY DOCTOROW, AND YOU MAY REPRODUCE IT ACCORDING TO THE CONDITIONS OF THE CC LICENSE.
Robert A. Preskill
The Corporate Law Group
Waterfront Plaza, Suite 120
500 Airport Boulevard
Burlingame, CA 94010-1914
rpreskill@TCLG.com
Ph: 650-227-8000
Fax: 650-227-8001
www.tclg.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/medialawyer
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