I haven’t written about copyright here in a long time, but you all know it’s my pet obsession, right? Whenever I tumble down its rabbit hole I end up growing and shrinking and losing track of reality until I eventually claw my way out – bloody, exhausted and filthy.
Thankfully, when Sister Diane asked me to be on Craftypod to talk about my pet topic, she had a specific focus in mind – Creative Commons for crafters. She also had lawyer Martin Ertl of LexPublica/Contractually on the show. He did a great job outlining the legal bits, and I spoke specifically about how and why crafters might choose to use less-strict-than-traditional-copyright CC licenses on our blogs and/or patterns, whether we sell them or distribute them for free.
Diane does what she does best – she edited our conversation into a solid high-level overview of a very complex topic. The complexity of copyright is what trips people up about it so much. We all love concrete answers, especially when we’re asking for business reasons, but copyright law isn’t the same kind of law as criminal law. It’s evolved over centuries not according to societies’ moral codes, but according to the circumstances we perceive in society that affect our ability to balance the interests of creators, consumers and the general public.
It’s my opinion that copyright law as it currently exists in much of the English-speaking world isn’t doing a very good job of achieving balance. I think it’s structured to favour creators too much, which kinda sucks for consumers and the commons. Aaaand, my toe’s approaching the edge of the rabbit hole, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Anyway, go give the podcast a listen – I swear it’s not controversial. If you have questions or comments, fire away!
Kim…I do like this post you have written. I was reseaching some ideas this past weekend and noticed that too many artists are putting down a CC on an idea that is not theirs and claiming it to be his/her own works. Many vintage images that were produced in the past eras are now being CC by people who do not own these images in any way. I cannot tell you how many times I saw this during this past weekend alone. How the heck can a person put a CC down on an image that is clearly created previously and state that no one else has the right to use it?? I think more has to be done on informing bloggers and artists on the proper use of CC and darn well stealing ideas and claiming it as their own. It seems a lot of “artists” now do not understand that one cannot take an image done in another era and slap a CC down and state no use can be done with this image. Clearly somehow these bloggers have missed the boat on the real use of CC and are not stepping up to the plate with his/her honesty as to where he/she got these images or such in the first place!