machine-envy

I suppose it’s not a surprise that lot of the people who spend too much of their time worrying about copyright law are involved in it themselves - software programmers, for instance. But people who write about copyright law, Creative Commons, etc in newspapers, blogs or “fornightly digests” play quite close to the edges of hypocrisy. Some CC a large part of their work, others, including me, are mute on the subject.

I have wasted time reading the terms and conditions of freelance contracts with a sense of pride in the idea that I might have rights. I’ve been paid for a syndication deal - translated into German, no less. I’ve also kicked myself when I’ve failed to negotiate rights and ended up doing work for hire without realising (for an organisation that advises artists on copyright!). And today I come across this, one of the poor (apologies) selection of photos I took at Remix Reading, reproduced by none other than the BBC.

No, they didn’t ask me. I waited until I got home to check the mails off this site, and there’s no first-jobber BBC Berkshire online picture assistant getting in touch to let me know they snafoo-ed my shot. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I’m not going to do anything about it either way. Which makes me a lazy copyfighter.

I will, however, spend a few more paragraphs musing on the situation, if only to recreate the train journeys to and from the Remix Reading launch (a half hour a piece) wherein myself and a British Net Celebrity were unpacking the ideas behind Creative Commons (and wondering if we’d picked up the wrong suitcase).

To recap, I take a photo of a group of drummers at the launch event of an arts collective who release all their work Creative Commons. Let’s assume that all the performances I saw that night - including the drumming, which was, in fact, part of a workshop - were performed under a Creative Commons-flavoured copyright. There was in fact a rather good poet who performed later that night not releasing his work CC “because I’m not a hippie”, but nevermind.

What if the flavour of CC the drummers were performing under was “share alike” - a viral licence like the GPL? That means my photo, perhaps its “mechanical copyright”, would also be CC. What happens then, when the BBC pick it up? Well, if it’s a non-commercial licence, they would need to negotiate terms to use the picture, just like normal copyright. But who do they negotiate with - me… or the drummers?

And is the BBC a commercial organisation, or a public service body? Is their use non-commercial? It’s getting clear why the UK version of Creative Commons is taking so long coming. And that’s without even touching on moral rights.

If an IP lawyer had been listening to us on the train, I think he would have been laughing to himself. We were so close to the answer, but we were never going to get there until we realised that the very same arguments we were having could only be settled by a team of lawyers. I don’t think lawyers get their work protected by intellectual property law - and I don’t suppose they mind all that much.