"Forks" is really what those licenses hosted here on OGA allow for, but sadly it isn't done all that often. So I applaud any efforts to promote this. Concerning the name of it... well remix sounds hip, but maybe a simple "adapt this work" or "submit a work based on this" would be even more logical.
Concerning the idea or altering the original file with permission of the author (e.g. revisions)... well rarely will an adaptation really result in a simply updated work, most of the time it is a siginifacant enough alteration which would justify leaving both versions on the site. Thus I don't think this is really necessary.
What would be cool would be a site specifically showing the fork tree of all works (e.g. show works forked 3,4,5 times etc) to see what works are really worked on colaboratively... not a must have but fun to see for sure. That page could also show whe one work is based on two or more different works, thus joining the trees ;)
Phew, I actually read all that wall of text ;) And believe it or not, the same line of reasoning (e.g. that everything belongs to everybody, since there can not be a "sole" creator) has been applied to property in general, by the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin over a 100 years ago :p
For all practical purposes however, like it or not, there has to be someone who does the "final step", or collection, remix... hell maybe just the final nail to fit it all together. But without him the final work would not exists!
Thus to foster the creation of "final works" one should give that last contributor a compensation for his efforts, which is most practically a limited copyright term on the work.
In a sense (and purely theoretically) you are of course right, that he isn't really entitled to that (or at least only to an insignificantly small part), but if you agree that the creation of the work was a good thing, and you would like to encourage him and others to create more nice works, then this is a practical way of doing it.
The rest of humanity can then have it as public domain a few years later :p
Concerning the GPL: As far as I understood, it says that you should not misrepresent the original creator, which is similar to an attribution clause, but is for works with hundreds of different authors more convinient in praxis. And for me that is good enough for sure. ;)
Otherwise... well yes that is part of it, and probably the one that will have the most practical impact.
But having an agency (or several ones) that gets payed for storing, protecting, but also ensuring the novelty of a creation sounds like a good addition to the current system.
In fact I can imagine a system where you pay for example a small extra to make a "copyright" insurance on your work, and then the agency will make sure that your registered work is not copied or distributed against your license terms.
Because right now a copyright of a "small" artist is basically worth nothing, since it would be way out of his or her financial capability to actually enforce it in court (that's why the GPL is more or less a toothless tiger).
Besides that... the patent system, while far from perfect, has worked very well for more than hundred of years now, while it is becoming quite clear that the copyright system in its current incarnation is simply not working anymore (and for sure contrary to the public good).
I agree with you on your licensing policy (in the current system), and you could still easily license your works after registration under conditions like the creative commons licenses.
I for example license my good works under the GPL/CC-BY-SA to ensure that they stay(!) in a space somewhat like public domain for everyones benefit (e.g. the concept of copyleft). This would be the case in a "patent" system more or less also since works based on public domain works (without significantly improving on them) will be classified as "prior art" and thus not "patentable".
And while I also agree that initially this patent based system might lower contributions by license aware artists, most artwork produced is not put under an license at all (unless sold).
If all those works would automatically go to the public domain (unless the artist would actually interfere with that) that would be a tremendous increase of public good (in the national economics sense).
And in fact if you do not plan to profit (make a living) from your art, then why not place it in the public domain? Sure there are plenty of fears ("someone will benefit from MY work"), or basically pet peeves ("I HAVE to be attributed"), but when you really look at those logically they do not apply to works you are not going to "use" anyways. Besides most people will give you credit for you work, even though it is not legally required (the GPL btw specifically states that attribution is not required).
At least those concerns do not out weight the benefits to the public good in my opinion (and of course everyone is free to register his work for a small fee), and once such a system of a free exchange of public domain "designs" is tightly establish, most artists would probably have a hard time even imagining going back to the old restrictive system we have right now.
What such a system would establish in praxis is that all non commercial (e.g. unregistered or expired) art can be freely traded, build upon, modified, remixed automatically, without the tremendous effort it is currently to convince artists to place their works under a free license.
And in fact there are three types of artists (four if you count the commercial ones) out there right now. Those convinced to used free licenses (a tiny minority), those stuck in the current intellectual property regime who do not allow use anyways (and would also register works if necessary; a medium sized population), and those (by my experience a large majority) who I even have a hard time explaining why their works even need a license ("yeah, sure use that stuff... would be nice if you mention me somewhere for it though").
On the other hand such a "patent" system would provide sensible protection to those artists that actually do want to make a living from their artworks, and also encourage investing time an money into "designs", without demanding overly difficult or expensive measures to ensure that protection.
For me at least such a system makes sense, much more so than the current one for sure. And I think most people would agree once they would have actually experienced the benefits of such a system.
Well, in regard to point 2: Just like patents keeping the "source" would be not done by the artist himself but by the patent/copyright office. Of course the question is what is actually the source, but I think a reasonable solution can be found. In the case of patents it's a good short description of what your idea is about, is case of art it should be a easily accessible format, or something else that can be stored well by the office which includes all the essential parts of what make up the work.
As an added side benefit one would get a incredibly good collection of public domain works all though the servers of the patent/copyright office, or though mirrors of it, as it is the case with Google patents nowadays already.
Concerning 3 and 4: Well one might disagree on this, but if the application is sufficiently simple (for example web-based) and cheap, I don't see a problem there. In fact I would prefer if works where the original author does not even bother to do these simple steps would be automatically public domain. The author does not really loose anything by this (as expressed by his unwillingness to do a simple copyright registration), but all those millions of cases where something can not be used due to automatic copyright would be dealt with for everyones benefit.
In the end (and this refers to point 4) this would also automatically result in a selection of works with sufficient complexity, as for other works nearly no one will bother to register those. In praxis much more in detail checks (as done in the patent system) will be too expensive for registraion prices to be low enough anyways, thus this will only weed out very obvious examples, or cases of pure plagiarisms (which everyone will agree is a good thing ;) ).
This is an really old discussion (old in internet terms I have to admit ;) ), and while you made a good write up on it (which I guess few people would disagree with) it doesn't really add to the debate :p
I personally think that copyright law is in a sense an outdated and lacking version of patent law, which deals exactly with what you call design costs, but in the technical realm. Now don't get me wrong... there is still a lot that could be improved about patent law, and especially those crazy software patents of late are not much else than a return to what is similar to copyright law (due to patent granters who did not fully understand software yet).
But lets have a short look on what is actually different about patent law compared to copyright and why I think it is much superior:
1. It expires much quicker (but can be extended for a limited amount if the creator wishes so), so after 20 years (which I think is too long for some type of products, but that is only a minor issue) it will become public domain.
2. It forces the inventor to make the "source" available for everyone at a (usually) fair price, and after 20 years there is a good "source" available freely.
3. Only those ideas that the creator actually deemed worth of being protected (e.g. went to the trouble of registering a patent) are protected, no automatic protection of every small insignificant piece like in copyright law (but the current costs for registering a patent are too high, and should scale depending on the product/idea).
4. Only works of significant complexity and novelty are protected, thus again making small pieces of ideas free for everyone to use (and discouraging cheap copies ;) ).
5. It doesn't even pretend to make the analogy to real world goods ;)
So vote for me in the next general elections and I will make the world a better place :p
"Forks" is really what those licenses hosted here on OGA allow for, but sadly it isn't done all that often. So I applaud any efforts to promote this. Concerning the name of it... well remix sounds hip, but maybe a simple "adapt this work" or "submit a work based on this" would be even more logical.
Concerning the idea or altering the original file with permission of the author (e.g. revisions)... well rarely will an adaptation really result in a simply updated work, most of the time it is a siginifacant enough alteration which would justify leaving both versions on the site. Thus I don't think this is really necessary.
What would be cool would be a site specifically showing the fork tree of all works (e.g. show works forked 3,4,5 times etc) to see what works are really worked on colaboratively... not a must have but fun to see for sure. That page could also show whe one work is based on two or more different works, thus joining the trees ;)
Phew, I actually read all that wall of text ;) And believe it or not, the same line of reasoning (e.g. that everything belongs to everybody, since there can not be a "sole" creator) has been applied to property in general, by the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin over a 100 years ago :p
For all practical purposes however, like it or not, there has to be someone who does the "final step", or collection, remix... hell maybe just the final nail to fit it all together. But without him the final work would not exists!
Thus to foster the creation of "final works" one should give that last contributor a compensation for his efforts, which is most practically a limited copyright term on the work.
In a sense (and purely theoretically) you are of course right, that he isn't really entitled to that (or at least only to an insignificantly small part), but if you agree that the creation of the work was a good thing, and you would like to encourage him and others to create more nice works, then this is a practical way of doing it.
The rest of humanity can then have it as public domain a few years later :p
Ahh.. well I actually finally planned to submit something for this contest. But I missed the deadline :(
Na doesn't matter.... was an old "refurbished" model anyways, so it might have been a bit unfair to submit.
But I will upload it in the next few days!
Concerning the GPL: As far as I understood, it says that you should not misrepresent the original creator, which is similar to an attribution clause, but is for works with hundreds of different authors more convinient in praxis. And for me that is good enough for sure. ;)
Otherwise... well yes that is part of it, and probably the one that will have the most practical impact.
But having an agency (or several ones) that gets payed for storing, protecting, but also ensuring the novelty of a creation sounds like a good addition to the current system.
In fact I can imagine a system where you pay for example a small extra to make a "copyright" insurance on your work, and then the agency will make sure that your registered work is not copied or distributed against your license terms.
Because right now a copyright of a "small" artist is basically worth nothing, since it would be way out of his or her financial capability to actually enforce it in court (that's why the GPL is more or less a toothless tiger).
Besides that... the patent system, while far from perfect, has worked very well for more than hundred of years now, while it is becoming quite clear that the copyright system in its current incarnation is simply not working anymore (and for sure contrary to the public good).
I agree with you on your licensing policy (in the current system), and you could still easily license your works after registration under conditions like the creative commons licenses.
I for example license my good works under the GPL/CC-BY-SA to ensure that they stay(!) in a space somewhat like public domain for everyones benefit (e.g. the concept of copyleft). This would be the case in a "patent" system more or less also since works based on public domain works (without significantly improving on them) will be classified as "prior art" and thus not "patentable".
And while I also agree that initially this patent based system might lower contributions by license aware artists, most artwork produced is not put under an license at all (unless sold).
If all those works would automatically go to the public domain (unless the artist would actually interfere with that) that would be a tremendous increase of public good (in the national economics sense).
And in fact if you do not plan to profit (make a living) from your art, then why not place it in the public domain? Sure there are plenty of fears ("someone will benefit from MY work"), or basically pet peeves ("I HAVE to be attributed"), but when you really look at those logically they do not apply to works you are not going to "use" anyways. Besides most people will give you credit for you work, even though it is not legally required (the GPL btw specifically states that attribution is not required).
At least those concerns do not out weight the benefits to the public good in my opinion (and of course everyone is free to register his work for a small fee), and once such a system of a free exchange of public domain "designs" is tightly establish, most artists would probably have a hard time even imagining going back to the old restrictive system we have right now.
What such a system would establish in praxis is that all non commercial (e.g. unregistered or expired) art can be freely traded, build upon, modified, remixed automatically, without the tremendous effort it is currently to convince artists to place their works under a free license.
And in fact there are three types of artists (four if you count the commercial ones) out there right now. Those convinced to used free licenses (a tiny minority), those stuck in the current intellectual property regime who do not allow use anyways (and would also register works if necessary; a medium sized population), and those (by my experience a large majority) who I even have a hard time explaining why their works even need a license ("yeah, sure use that stuff... would be nice if you mention me somewhere for it though").
On the other hand such a "patent" system would provide sensible protection to those artists that actually do want to make a living from their artworks, and also encourage investing time an money into "designs", without demanding overly difficult or expensive measures to ensure that protection.
For me at least such a system makes sense, much more so than the current one for sure. And I think most people would agree once they would have actually experienced the benefits of such a system.
(interesting discussion though ;) )
Well, in regard to point 2: Just like patents keeping the "source" would be not done by the artist himself but by the patent/copyright office. Of course the question is what is actually the source, but I think a reasonable solution can be found. In the case of patents it's a good short description of what your idea is about, is case of art it should be a easily accessible format, or something else that can be stored well by the office which includes all the essential parts of what make up the work.
As an added side benefit one would get a incredibly good collection of public domain works all though the servers of the patent/copyright office, or though mirrors of it, as it is the case with Google patents nowadays already.
Concerning 3 and 4: Well one might disagree on this, but if the application is sufficiently simple (for example web-based) and cheap, I don't see a problem there. In fact I would prefer if works where the original author does not even bother to do these simple steps would be automatically public domain. The author does not really loose anything by this (as expressed by his unwillingness to do a simple copyright registration), but all those millions of cases where something can not be used due to automatic copyright would be dealt with for everyones benefit.
In the end (and this refers to point 4) this would also automatically result in a selection of works with sufficient complexity, as for other works nearly no one will bother to register those. In praxis much more in detail checks (as done in the patent system) will be too expensive for registraion prices to be low enough anyways, thus this will only weed out very obvious examples, or cases of pure plagiarisms (which everyone will agree is a good thing ;) ).
This is an really old discussion (old in internet terms I have to admit ;) ), and while you made a good write up on it (which I guess few people would disagree with) it doesn't really add to the debate :p
I personally think that copyright law is in a sense an outdated and lacking version of patent law, which deals exactly with what you call design costs, but in the technical realm. Now don't get me wrong... there is still a lot that could be improved about patent law, and especially those crazy software patents of late are not much else than a return to what is similar to copyright law (due to patent granters who did not fully understand software yet).
But lets have a short look on what is actually different about patent law compared to copyright and why I think it is much superior:
1. It expires much quicker (but can be extended for a limited amount if the creator wishes so), so after 20 years (which I think is too long for some type of products, but that is only a minor issue) it will become public domain.
2. It forces the inventor to make the "source" available for everyone at a (usually) fair price, and after 20 years there is a good "source" available freely.
3. Only those ideas that the creator actually deemed worth of being protected (e.g. went to the trouble of registering a patent) are protected, no automatic protection of every small insignificant piece like in copyright law (but the current costs for registering a patent are too high, and should scale depending on the product/idea).
4. Only works of significant complexity and novelty are protected, thus again making small pieces of ideas free for everyone to use (and discouraging cheap copies ;) ).
5. It doesn't even pretend to make the analogy to real world goods ;)
So vote for me in the next general elections and I will make the world a better place :p
Very usefull models for every FOSS CS clone ;) Na seriously, very useful models, thx!
Somehow my first reaktion was... spaceship what space ship? I see a mighty fine helmet there ;)
http://www.openmusicarchive.org/ (PD music)
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