This blog post will attempt to discuss the following argument:
Medosch argues that: “CC does not pay any attention at all to the issue of an economic model for supporting cultural production” (Reader, page 315).
In my last blog post, I discussed why I had chosen to implement a Creative Commons license, and why I had chosen to use a Creative Commons Attributes 3.0 Australia license in particular to protect the content of my blog for the purpouses it intends. In the readings from Week Eleven, Medosch argues that Creative Commons still has not answered the biggest question facing copyright laws in light of new technologies and file transfer systems, in terms of allowing people to protect their work and content from illegal distribution and editing and the economic consequences of such activity.
I concluded my last blog post, by remarking that whilst the Creative Commons license in use on this blog was fit to protect my work to the extent that this project requires, it would never be anywhere near adequate for those whose work is where they derive their income from. For the purposes of this project, and because I stand nothing to gain from it economically, it does not bother me if my work is shared, or edited, so long as that work is attributed to me. For an up and coming Melbournian band, who do not have the millions of dollars someone like Kanye West might, who rely heavily on album sales, such a licence would never offer these artists adequate legal protection, and would do little to establish, sustain and protect the necessary income for these artists to support their own “cultural production”, as Medosch phrases it.
Considering this, it is hard to debate Medosch’s contention. Creative Commons, to put it simply, do not provide a viable solution to the shortcomings of existing copyright and licencing laws in terms of protecting licence holders economically. What Medosch ignores though, is that Creative Commons was never established to solve this problem, and that is an important point to make. Creative Commons was created with the purpose of encouraging creators of such content to be more liberal with their work, how it may be distributed, who may create derivative works and how those might also be shared and where their work, and edited versions of that work, may be shared. To claim that Creative Commons fails to “the issue of an economic model for supporting cultural production” is to state the obvious but, perhaps more importantly, it is also to misunderstand why Creative Commons was established in the first place.
Creative Commons is a licensing system that allows for, and encourages, greater transparency between creators and consumers. It is intended to allow for a more flexible system that allows those creating content to share on a grander scale, and gives greater creative freedoms to consumers in terms of creating derivative works, to whatever extent the creator feels fit. It’s failure to address the issue of an economic model to sustain the production of cultural products is as much to do with the intentions behind Creative Commons as a licencing system as anything else.
galmat 