p2pnet.net News:- The music industry “ought to embrace Creative Commons as an agile partner providing tools for new ways to do business,” says ex-RIAA boss Hilary Rosen.

Her surprising remark comes in a Wired Magazine article with Rosen’s by-line in which she confesses she’s, “come to love Creative Commons”.

The transformation apparently came about after she and CC creator Lawrence Lessig were paid a “tidy sum” to spend two days, “disagreeing with one another in front of a lot of people,” she says in How I Learned to Love Larry, to be published in the November Wired.

Paying the “tidy sum” out was the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and, earning his fee, Lessig, “started with a tortured and sarcastic history of copyright protection,” says Rosen. “He railed against such public laws as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which created a US leadership role in protecting digital works against technologies designed to circumvent copyright protection.”

Rosen says she, in turn, “pointed out the value of laws that kept pace with technology, rather than those that were usurped by it. Lessig also complained about the Copyright Term Extension Act, which adds several years to the terms of protected works. I countered: Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn’t songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?”

Farmers and song-writers. OK. But how did Rosen come to love Lessig?

“If the essence of copyright law is to allow creators to have control, he argued, then there are ways to maintain ownership of copyrighted works and still make it possible for the average person to license the use of those works,” she says in the Wired piece, going on:

“After all, what’s wrong with a licensing system that makes music more accessible to more people?

“Until that moment, I had dismissed Creative Commons as a sleight-of-hand maneuver, a way to mouth platitudes about the benefits of copyright while in fact joining ranks with the Everything for Free Foundation. But Lessig was making a persuasive case. This is going in the wrong direction, I remember thinking. Had I lost my edge?

“Hardly. I’m still cynical about its origins, but I’ve come to love Creative Commons. The organization seeks to calm some of music’s roiling waters, from unlawful sampling to file-sharing. As the RIAA continues to use the courts to discourage the illegal, widespread distribution of songs through peer-to-peer systems, there has been a chilling effect on other, legitimate uses. Many musicians and consumers fear reusing pieces of others’ songs – even for noncommercial purposes. Nobody wants to get caught in the crosshairs of industry lawyers.”

===================

See:-

tidy sum - How I Learned to Love Larry, Wired Magazine, November, 2004

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2004 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 5855 times