Seth Godin and those who worry about republishing of (freely licensed) bloggy material, please watch this video by Lucas Gonze.
Republishers, if they add only noise or worse (in the case of sploggers) are primarily a problem for aggregators (Amazon can be thought of one, as can search engines), not creators.
That said, if Godin really hates the idea of a republisher using the license granted by Godin, that license does allow the licensor to request the removal of attribution from derivative or collective works. If this was requested eventually one couldn’t find the commercial outrage version of Godin’s book by searching for Godin’s name on Amazon. (But I have no idea if that provision could apply in this case, am not a lawyer, generally don’t know what I’m talking about, etc.).
Evidently, Lucas still hasn’t achieved enlightenment out of the CC-SA-NC ghetto.
The big question for me is: was it a good or bad idea to create the ‘NC’ qualifier in the first place?
If it hadn’t been created, people would have invented it or taken a lot longer to migrate to CC and then to CC-SA, or, being created, CC-SA-NC is a stepping stone that gets folk slightly closer, slightly sooner to CC-SA.
There are people like Lucas who have grown up with copyright who still think they have a right to control what people do with their art (or get a cut of ad revenue) – even if they are ready to embrace p2p promotion.
The thing is, ceteris paribus, which do people value more? An aggregation service that has ads, or one that doesn’t?
One can assume that a preference can only exist for an ad based service because it is a better funded service – and consequently that revenue accrues because of its superior service – and not because of the quality of the art it serves – assuming the art is royalty free.
Looking at it from another perspective. If you have an audience of a million, which art would you prefer to air? Art with royalty, or art without? And the corollary: is there a shortage of artists willing to provide royalty free art in exchange for promotion to an audience of a million?
If the artist feels their art has value, they can sell it to their audience. The bigger their audience, the bigger their revenue. Once sold, the art can be royalty free – and hence more attractive to aggregators/broadcasters.
I wonder how popular GPL software would have been if it stipulated a royalty for any commercial use?
Please watch the video again. You completely missed the point.
The GPL did have competition from “shareware” and the like that can be seen as roughly equivalent to NC licenses, and won. My thoughts on the matter here.
I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. :-/
I realised my error after posting.
Lucas really crammed his sarcasm in the last microsecond of that video – and I missed it the first time round.
I thought I was getting it in the first 95%, i.e. sell at $5, and suffer the jealousy that someone else can make $20, vs not sell at $20 and remain poor.
And then, I don’t know why, but he seemed so earnest in the final 5% about wanting a cut of any ad revenue, that I completely overlooked the possibility of hyposarcasm.
Mea culpa.
Indeed — and understood.