On 15/06/07, Ian Betteridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Pro-am's can do great work (and can graduate to doing it as professionals), but that's not the same as saying the man in the street can walk in and be a top photographer, which is what was stated earlier. It takes a long time to get that good, unless you're extremely gifted.
The rise of digital authoring tools means that as time passes, the man in the street is more and more likely to be a pro-am, and more and more likely to be that good - especially if he can combine his talents with others collaboratively, "standing on the shoulders of giants." And, he's going to be more and more likely to seek ways to monetize that value without becoming a full time professional author. This is why non-commercial Creative Commons licenses are a problem, imo: For about 10 years the free software movement was almost totally non-commercial, and then business kicked off and has powered the whole thing since then. IMO this is directly attributable to the copyleft-thanks and commercial-use-please aspects of the GPL. As you can see in this graph, http://swivel.com/graphs/show/9227397 (from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics :-) the CC-NC licenses are by far the most popular, with CC-NC-ND and CC-NC-SA at a similarly higher growth than the others - and BY and BY-ND are more popular than BY-SA. Free culture is shooting itself future self in the foot, because non-commercial licenses will hobble the remix market. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol4-1/coates.asp is a good academic paper on the 1st and 2nd generation of CC users. What do the 3rd, 4th, 5th look like? Will they be helped or hindered by NC terms? A CC users I recently queried about this (a photographer) said that NC terms don't matter, because they are happy to give permission to low budget organisations. But a culture of permission is not a culture of freedom. Its not that people shouldn't be paid for authorship - they should, of course - but that the social system of payment should not be draconian. If copyright duration was contracting instead of expanding, I'd be much more favourable to NC terms - but the reality is that the public domain has got a large gap in it from the early 1930s until the early 2000s when CC appeared, and a NC commons is not ideal. -- Regards, Dave - 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/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
