Creative battle: Creative Commons versus traditional copyright

Recently, ASCAP, the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers announced a fundraiser to undertake legal action against the influences of the Copyleft movement, in particular against Creative Commons, think tank Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. According to ASCAP, these organisations and initiatives threaten copyright and takes away the income of authors.

ccMixters, a creative community that operates under cc licences, has mounted a counter initiative. They argue that it is because of the alternative licenses that they are able to develop their creative skills and make new works while maintaining a measure of authorship and control over the future of their works.

They seize the opportunity to create more works and have started a contest: the FREEDOM TO SHARE Remix Event. With this event, ccMixters wants to show that copyleft leads to beautiful things and is not developed from to unduly profit from other’s work. The event consists of two parts. In the first round, participants write and produce a new work, which they upload to the site of ccMixters. In the second round, they create a remix consisting of at least one of the uploaded tracks.

The deadline is 28 August. We are very curious to see the results!

The beauty of Creative Commons licenses is that they offer the freedom to explicitly allow others to make use of your work. Traditional copyright only states what is not allowed. ccMixers argues, and this is a point that we strongly adhere to, too, on this blog, is that the choice of licences should lie with the author or rights holder and to a much lesser extent be dictated by lobbyists or file sharing platforms.

ASCAP fears that the copyleft movement will further undermine the traditional copyright position and will make it harder for artists and authors to earn their keep with their works. In their letter, they go a little further by seeing a conspiracy of organisations, amongst which the above, to topple the copyright system because people are unwilling to pay for content.