[dropbox] New copyright grants artists greater license


> From:           "Vera Franz" <vfranz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date sent:      Tue, 15 Jun 2004



> New copyright grants artists greater license
> By Jennifer L. Schenker (IHT)
> Monday, June 14, 2004
>
>
> An alternative copyright that allows authors and artists to give away
> their work while retaining some commercial rights is being adapted
> for use across Europe and beyond.
>
> Lawyers, musicians and filmmakers gathered in Berlin on Friday for
> the German introduction of the licenses, which were first drafted for
> use in the United States in 2001 by Creative Commons, a Silicon
> Valley nonprofit organization. The German debut followed the
> introduction of Creative Commons licenses in Japan in March, in
> Finland in May and in Brazil on June 4.
>
> Some 60 countries are expected to adapt Creative Commons licenses to
> their jurisdiction, "and Germany is a critical part of that process,"
> said Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University law professor who is
> the chairman and co-founder of Creative Commons.
>
> Creative Commons licenses will be introduced in the Netherlands next
> Friday and in France by the end of the summer, with a goal of
> creating licenses for all EU countries by year-end, Lessig said in an
> interview by phone last week.
>
> The idea behind Creative Commons licenses is to give musicians the
> freedom to release their work to people who want to disseminate it or
> to remix the music and try something new, Lessig said. Artists choose
> how they want to share the work, specifying whether they want credit
> for reuse, whether they want to be paid for commercial use or whether
> it is acceptable to change it.
>
> "This is a different way of spreading or building upon musical
> works," Lessig said.
>
> Lessig, who says that copyright and patent law is too restrictive, is
> the author of "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the
> Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity," which he has made
> available on the Internet for free. The bound version from Penguin
> Press costs $24.95. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court
> against extending the length of time that copyrights cover original
> works, a period that lasts 95 years in the United States, and is an
> advocate of open-source software, which is distributed freely on the
> Internet.
>
> Businesses that own the rights or sell software, however, argue that
> copyrights and patents reward creative and inventive people for their
> talents and compensate companies that hire and promote them. The ease
> with which digitized music and other digital files are shared on the
> Internet has given the intellectual arguments new importance.
>
> Bj?rn Hartmann, a German disc jockey and creator of the online music
> label textone.org, which releases free music, said that while he
> believed Europe's independent musicians and those with small or
> online labels would benefit from Creative Commons licenses, most
> established performing artists and composers in Germany would not, at
> least for now.
>
> The German introduction of Creative Commons licenses, which Lessig
> acknowledged was the "most difficult to date," is complicated by
> rules in Germany that require musicians to give up rights to their
> work when they sign up with agencies that collect royalties on their
> behalf.
>
> The license has been adapted to take German copyright law into
> account, requiring changes in things such as the definitions of terms
> and the extent to which a work can be modified, said Till J?ger, a
> German lawyer who helped adapt the license for Germany.
>
> But many performing artists in Germany sign up with a specialized
> local royalty collection agency called the German Phono Association,
> and give up some of their rights when they do so. And most composers
> or songwriters sign up with another royalty collection agency, called
> the German Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction
> Rights, and allow it to negotiate on their behalf, J?ger said.
>
> While performers and composers who have signed up with collection
> agencies cannot opt for a Creative Commons license because they no
> longer hold the rights to their own works, Christiane Asschenfeldt,
> the international coordinator for Creative Commons, said discussions
> have begun with the Society for Musical Performing and Reproduction
> Rights to work out a solution.
>
> Society officials were not available for comment on Friday.
>
> When composers sign up with the society, they sign over the rights
> not only to a particular work but to all works in their repertoire,
> past, present and future, said Thomas Dreier, a professor at the
> University of Karlsruhe's Information Law Institute in Germany, who
> helped draft the German implementation of the Creative Commons
> license.
>
> Meanwhile, independent musicians in Germany as well as others -
> including writers, filmmakers, scientists and photographers - can
> elect to use the Creative Commons license.
>
> Eight of the institutes that are part of the Max Planck Society for
> the Advancement of the Sciences, Germany's leading organization for
> basic scientific research, will be among the first to use the
> Creative Commons license, Asschenfeldt said. Scientists will use the
> Creative Commons license as a way of publicly disseminating research
> while reserving some but not all rights.
>
> European Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative sponsored by the
> European Commission that involves three of the Max Planck institutes
> and 13 other European partners, has also said it wants a Creative
> Commons license, she said.
>
> International Herald Tribune
>
>


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