K: Hope you're doing well. Noticed your blog on Creative Commons, and Creative Commons troubles me for some reason. I noticed that you've semi-endorsed it and wanted to know why you'd use it over something like the GNU copyleft stuff that's been around for years?

A: I like the idea of Creative Commons because it's not really trying to create new types of licenses, but just standardize data about the licenses on a work and make it searchable, keeping a fair degree of metadata on each work. In fact, you can choose to place a copyleft license on your work through them. I think having that standardized licensing data is more valuable than having to try to find a picture of a sunset that's clearly and unmistakeably royalty-and-copyright free using Google's image search.

I'm no expert on this stuff either. If you'll notice in my post I wrote a lot of "seems like"s because this is just my first pass at the Creative Commons concept, except for a brief mention I heard ages ago. It's certainly open for debate in my book.

K: Let's look at the issue another way. Say you like to give "money" (a subset of your "works") away to charity? Do you need a formal/legal conduit through which you're going to make all your future charitable contributions?

Why do we need this organization to help us "give away" our stuff? Just as you may pick and choose the terms of your charitable contributions, as they're presented to you or make themselves available to you, why can't you dynamically pick and choose the terms of your "charitable web works and web contributions" to the world?

A: I would need a conduit if I'm donating money-- it'd be called legal tender. I get to decide how much money to give, when to give, and who to give it to, but what I give is a government document saying "this piece of paper is worth X." I could also choose to volunteer my time or donate food or clothing or items to the charity, and avoid that formal/legal conduit. Many people choose to donate money out of convenience, and I see Creative Commons as that type of convenience. You can either manually put a value on belongings you wish to donate or time you wish to share with that organization, or you can take a shortcut and use the government's pre-assigned values (called dollars, rubles, pesos, pounds, euros, what have you). You can take the time to construct a copyleft license with the terms you wish to apply to your work (which may likely not coincide with pre-existing licenses, like the GPL-- perhaps you don't want to allow others to alter your work at all), or you can use a tool to create some standardized verbiage for you. Also, using CC doesn't preclude using other types of licenses on other works or changing existing licenses on works, just as you don't have to keep giving money to the World Wildlife Fund for that panda bear you "adopted" after you decide that you can do better by donating bamboo for the panda to eat (OK, lame example). I don't know if the money analogy is a perfect one, but that's how I see it.

Whether or not in the long run it's a good thing to use CC because of convenience or standardization is a separate issue, I think, to why people would use it. But a lot of artists, I imagine, especially budding ones, would possibly have little knowledge of licensing to begin with, and this might give them a good introduction to it.

K: <VERY WEAK ARGUMENT> I'm also wondering what happens when you become famous and your works become valuable? Let's say you have poems that you don't think are worth any money today, buy next year you get "hot" and people are falling all over themselves for your stuff. Will the savvy lawyers and the big media companies automatically freely acquire everything you've done up to this point in time? If you CC each web page, this isn't a problem, but what if you CC your entire site? </VERY WEAK ARGUMENT>

A: Hmm... I don't know if that necessarily changes anything. If I used Creative Commons to generate a copyleft license for my whole site, with terms that it was freely distributable, but not alterable, it doesn't seem like Big Media would have much advantage in freely acquiring my older material, since anyone else could get it for free simply by going to my web site. What marketing advantage would they have in producing a copy of my poems which any consumer could go fetch for themselves?

K: I blog, you blog. My stuff is worthless and always will be worthless so just take it-- but don't sell it... it's copylefted. On the other hand, if I want to use your stuff, I write to you and ask your permission because its implicitly copyrighted. Are you that busy that you don't want to be bothered with an email from, say, a publishing house that's interested in your work? How much information is implicitly contained in that email to you? The request in and of itself has value to you, doesn't it? With CC, there's no need for the individual emails, the lawyers CC conduit has stolen this communication.

In a way, doesn't CC seem like a conduit for those big sucker major media companies to easily suck the content out of every one of little guys on the web and somehow usurp its value?

A: I see your argument, but I see some counter-arguments. One, the sheer likelihood that I would get "discovered" by a publisher and sent an email asking for permission to print my poems is so infinitessimally small even an electron microscope wouldn't be able to see it. I don't say that thinking that my poems aren't good, but because that's not the way publishers seem to currently operate. They accept submissions, and if they're reading new authors, it's new authors who are already in print in a journal or literary mag.

Secondly, I don't see CC as disrupting the conduit of information, either. If a publisher finds poem X of mine that they found through searching CC's database, they will still have to come to my web site to view the poem itself and can email to prompt me for more poems that aren't already licensed. And in fact, I may (emphasis on the possibly) likely gain more exposure to publishers or someone who knows a publisher with my information available in CC's database than I would only having things on my personal web site.

Lastly, how can corporations/ big media/ my grandma usurp the value of something that's freely available to everyone? Corporate usurpation comes from a corporation's ability to limit access to something valuable. If something's in the public domain, a corporation can't keep that thing to itself or limit an individual's access to it.

K: You're convincing me that this might be a pretty good idea.

Just one more thing... let me rephrase this somehow. Let's say you designate a web page of poems as CC'd. Now, you instantly become a star, perhaps your exceptionally rare and beautiful singing voice is discovered. At this point of discovery all your stuff instantly becomes extremely valuable-- even your poems that you previously deemed to be only remotely valuable.

At this point in time-- your point of stardom discovery - can you "revoke" the CC designation and Copyright all your prior works that have now become very, very valuable?

Let's call this occurrence your stardom option, your option to great wealth, glory and fame. Aren't you giving the wealth portion of the stardom option to Creative Commons for them to distribute to their database users?

A: I don't think this issue has been fully addressed; unfortunately, this is where my knowledge of copyright vs. public domain gets really hazy. Interestingly, I also haven't found much that addresses this issue on the CC site or from a cursory initial search of some of the sites it links to.

To begin with, I'm fairly certain that anything in the public domain stays in the public domain (although I don't know this for a fact). So if you release your work into the public domain, in this situation, I don't think you can revoke that.

However, CC allows certain types of copyright under specific licenses. If you copyleft a work, it is copyrighted, and released under certain terms and conditions. Whether or not you can later revoke those terms and conditions is something I definitely don't know, but I imagine that since you've still maintained intellectual ownership of a work, there is some leeway there.

Also complicating the matter is the fact that something in the public domain can be copyrighted, in a sense. The song "Mary Had a Little Lamb" isn't protected by copyright, but if I, as a freshly famous singing diva, put a version of me singing that song on my new hit album, the track on the CD is copyrighted, and anyone distributing it on Gnutella is technically violating that copyright. This applies to things like translations as well, or special print editions of books (e.g. the original text of the Bible isn't copyrighted, but the New International Version of the Bible is).

Back to the main question, though. This is, really, the crux of the whole intellectual property debate that's been raging since the advent of technology that makes intellectual property easily distributable. If I give my idea away for free, does that help me or hurt me in the long run if I become famous or already am famous?

Well, for one thing, you're not giving this stardom option to Creative Commons. Either you're giving it to the public domain, or you're giving it to the public in a limited way under a particular license. You do give Creative Commons some information on yourself and your work, but CC retains no right to the work itself.

For another thing, the "free exchange of ideas" argument is that although you may lose some royalties or monetary compensation for releasing works to the public or using some type of open content license, it may still benefit you in other ways to do so. If I end up being a one-hit-wonder despite my exceptional singing voice because my record company goes bankrupt or decides not to promote me, I may still retain some of my fame due to the freely distributable poems I wrote that are still circulating around in the public. Either way, I don't think this issue is easily answerable, so I'm going to cut myself off here, because I'm rambling a lot.