Amateur musicians of the digital age probably know more about remixing and recreating content than anyone else. We know that taking samples of culture and giving them a new context, rearranging them in different ways does create new forms of art.
None of us get paid for it and yet the current stranglehold of copyright law would deem us criminals for consuming and creating culture. This inflexibility leads many of us to the extreme position that all copyright law be damned, I’ll pirate whatever I want.
There is another way, to find a balance where content creators such as ourselves are empowered by the law not criminalized by it.
In this video Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons Larry Lessig talks about the law vs. creativity. (It’s a 20 minutes TED talk).
In this video Lessig talks about his book, “Free Culture” and the whole enterprise of making copyright law fair.
As content creators think about freeing your own contributions to culture. Allow your audience the pleasure of not only listening to your work but remixing it. If their remix turns out to be a hit you can go on negotiate a fair settlement of royalties.
As we expand a commons, an arena of free culture the copyright holders are forced to compete with a medium that offers their audience more.
Imagine if the works of Shakespeare were still own and monopolized by a single publishing company. Or Mozart or Beethoven…
By default all your works are fully copyright as soon as you make them. Just indicate otherwise by choosing which Creative Commons copyright you wish to use and add a link.
If you still don’t know what Creative Commons is, This video explains it all.
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