Talk:PublishingPolitics

Hi all.

I'm Katie, I've co-adopted this session. Here is a quite rambling journey through some of the stuff I would like to talk about.

I'm part of a collective that runs a not-for-profit bookshop/library at The Basement Social Centre in Manchester. A big part of my mission there is to promote zines. (Zines are independantly published magazines, often put together with photocopied pages and staples. There are zines on a huge variety of subjects, some are scrappy-looking while others are beautifully designed and illustrated.) We order zines from all over the world, which is crazy - shipping what is essentially a box full of paper from say the US or the Czech Republic, when paper is readily available here in the UK. I'd rather just buy one copy of a zine, and copy and distribute in myself, than have twenty shipped over from half way around the world, and re-order them every few months (and spend countless frustrating hours on the phone with the post office or the courier company if it doesn't turn up.)

If I want to copy and distribute a piece of work, there are two things stopping me from doing this:

1. Ethical considerations: if I believe that the creator of a work has a moral right to control how that work is copied, distributed, or re-used, then I will not copy that work unless you have the author/artist's permission to do so.

2. Copyright: legally any work is copyrighted as soon as it is created, even an email or a doodle in your notebook. If the work is copied without the author's permission the person doing the copying can be sued.

Both of these considerations mean that a lot of independantly produced writing, film, artwork, etc., doesn't get distributed as widely as it could, even if it is of high quality. Corporate media and artwork gets distributed widely because the mainstream publishers/distributors have the resources to print tens of thousands of copies, and to advertise them. Independantly produced works can only reach a wide audience if there is decentralized distribution - many small distributors pick up the work, make a small number of copies, and distribute them within their own community. The copies can either be something 'real' like a book or zine, or something intangible like an .mp3 or a .pdf or a film distributed over the Internet. Both copyright and consideration of the author's moral rights over their work block the work from being distributed in this way.

An author can give permission for their work to be copied using:

a) An informal statement. This can be as simple as writing 'copyleft' or 'anti-copyright' on a zine (or other work).

Problems with informal statements: they have no legal validity, so someone wanting to say put an image from your zine on her website might decide against it, because she has no legal protection against being sued. Also some people might not know what 'anti-copyright' or 'copyleft' mean: it may be better to write something a little more descriptive, like 'you are free to copy and distribute this work.'

b) Dedication to the public domain. Anyone can use your work in any way. If you want to make your work as free for others to use as possible then at first glance this would seem like the right choice, but your work can then be used in a derivative work which is less free than the original.

c) A license such as a Creative Commons license, the Free Art License or GNU Free Documentation License, which is written in lawyer-speak (you don't have to put the whole text of the license on your work, just a link to it).

Problems with with licenses: they tend to take up more space than an informal statement. Not a problem for an online work but a big problem for something like a zine or a cd. Since a lot of people won't know what a Creative Commons license is and won't be arsed to look it up on the web, you should include an informal statement as well to explain how the work can be used. There are lots of different licenses and they are mostly not compatible with each-other. It's possible that none of the licenses will offer what you want.

A license is better than informal permission because: it gives protection from copyright. Creative Commons licenses come with metadata, which means you can search the Internet for materiel licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses are viral - they prevent anyone from using your work to make a derivative work that is less free than the original.

There are a lot of projects out there (Indymedia and ClearChannel are examples) that are purely not-for-profit. The goal is to get the content distributed as widely as possible. To achieve this they want a license that allows the maximum possible freedom for the content to be copied and re-used, while preventing derivative works from being made which are less free than the original - i.e. the license must be viral. At the moment (correct me if I'm wrong!) there is no concensus as to which license is best - some projects use various Creative Commons licenses, some use an informal statement. This is a problem because the licenses for the most part aren't compatible with each-other. So say for example I wanted to make Compilation Project C using materiel from Project A which has a Creative Commons Attribution license and Project B which is licensed with the GNU FDL - I'd be out of luck. Also there are so many licenses out that it's confusing trying to pick one, many people probably don't bother, or just pick one that their friend recommended even if it doesn't do what they wanted it to do. It would be really great to have a sort of gold standard license, something comparable to the GPL. Then, at least within the community(ies) of people who create content either for the pure joy of it, or for the purpose of promoting positive social change, with no attempt to make a profit, we could start to all use the same license. In time a lot more people would get to know what the license was and how to use it, and thus putting a license on a piece of work would be less of a hassle. This would lead to works would get licenses that otherwise wouldn't have, and to works getting the same license, that would otherwise have had incompatible licenses. All of this would lead to independantly published works being distributed more widely, more easily. Which could only bring us that much closer to a worldwide revolution based on universal peace, joy, love and respect for all :)

The big question that I'd like to talk about is: which license would you choose? The GNU FDL? Creative Commons Share-Alike? The Free Art License? One I haven't heard of yet? Or are none of them good enough?

That's enough for now.

Katie.