Still/Open - Copyright

As I wrote yesterday, the workshop I attended last week included a number of areas of interest, including a talk on Creative Commons and alternative copyright initiatives by Elliott Bledsoe. This issue is obviously quite closely related to the work that is taking place within the second project of Design 2.0 however it is relevant to note that as of yet there have not been any serious mentions of Creative Commons on the project forum. I will summarize the goings on here and then post it on the forum.

Elliott is a young lawyer form some part of Australia that is not Melbourne and he is part of a research project which is aimed at representing the Creative Commons (CC) rights system in Australia and making a development of policy to represent the CC in a court of law. This is quite nice because it means that now CC can be used by Australians on Australian things and they can sue people who breach the rights within Australia. There are a few other advantages but I do not really care about those. Being Australian, the organisation Elliott represents chose to also implement ethically natured aspects of the policy when they composed it. Subsequently other countries did the same, but he suggests Australia was the first. This is of course not a surprise as that is how people here do things. 

In any case, Creative Commons as many people are well aware is a system that allows average people to have slightly more say in how their work is death with from a copyright perspective. The initiatives of CC institutions include creating "human readable" versions of the policy which can then be used to help people select the appropriate license for their content but also can be used to help potential breaches understand where the line is drawn, something which is obviously a problem with many other aspects of copyright today. 

Despite the great work done on CC I am still quite dubious of it as it completely does not deal well with commercial licensing and it does not offer any kind of rights management if you intend to achieve commercial compensation for your work. This is a bad thing because though artists are passionate about their work, they still need to eat. The CC solution to this problem is, in my opinion quite undeveloped. However, when I posed this issue to Elliott and mentioned that I was running a project in this regard he quoted a project called No Ank which is said to be the answer. At the moment it is just a budding project but they are thinking about it on some level.  Having partially reviewed their methods I feel they are not offering a solution per se but they are offering a method to handle the issue.

I do not support the localisation of new media copyright schemes however I appreciate the work that Elliott and his colleagues are doing.