Oh, Puleeeeaze!
So the other day I’m reading a blog post by Larry Lessig entitled “first we’re a ‘virus,’ now we kill people with AIDS.” Naturally I thought this was another case of Lessig going a bit overboard. Then I read the piece he was riffing off, a strangely propangandist article from Billboard called “Music biz wary of copyright sharing movement.”
The article makes two bizarre assumptions. The first is that Creative Commons is somehow reducing artist choice. As Larry says in his rebuttal:
We’re giving artists free tools. What they do with them is their choice. There are many who believe, as Butler quotes Andy Fraser to say, that “[n]o one should let artists give up their rights.” “Let.” Read that word again: “let.”
I find it appealingly ironic to claim that giving artists an alternative to existing coercive copyright schemes is itself somehow coercive, but it’s also flatly wrong and makes no sense. The next head-scratcher is the bald-face misrepresentation that Creative Commons always means free. This may be the philosophy that Lessig and many others espouse, but you can be a CC supporter and still believe in paid content. (I am, and I do.) What the article neglects to mention is that CC licenses generally cover non-commercial use only, so you can still make plenty of money from commerical exploitation.
The kicker is the last section, however. This is where the “we kill people with AIDS” part comes in. Sound like an exaggeration? Nope. The author actually cites a musician at the end of the article who appears to be making exactly this claim:
Andy Fraser hates to think what his fate might have been had Creative Commons existed when he was a young artist.
(Naturally he would have been compelled to use this license, right?) After explaining that Fraser made all his money essentially from licensing of one hit song by his band, Free, and another that was recorded by Robert Palmer, that author goes on to explain that “had he given up his rights to those early hits, he would not have the resources to cover his treatment for AIDS.”
I guess if you look hard enough you’ll always find a black guy who’s against civil rights, a woman who doesn’t believe in female suffrage or an Iraqi who welcomes occupation by violent foreigners. It’s great propanganda indeed to wrap reactionary dogma in a cloak of liberalism. But it’s still BS.
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I actually think it wouldn’t be hard at all to find your list of three, at least at the point in time when the issues they were afraid of had not yet achieved majority appeal. Why? Because people are afraid of change and if they can’t see something actually working, they don’t believe it will. Once CC gets going full blast, I’d pretty much bet your conservative candidate would have a different opinion.
Comment by Julia — 5/30/2005 @ 1:58 pm
I was trying to make another point, which is that the article is unforgiveable propaganda because it rolls out a sympathetic poster child with a non-mainstream view. You’re right, however, that views on CC in general have not had nearly as much time to evolve. So maybe I should have made another point, namely that I believe that one day CC will be as uncontroversial as civil rights or universal suffrage (and condemning it will be similarly beyond the pale).
Comment by Matt — 5/31/2005 @ 5:10 pm