[wos] [ipr] IHT on Lessig at WOS

[Vera Franz]

New copyright grants artists greater license
By Jennifer L. Schenker (IHT)
Monday, June 14, 2004


An alternative copyright that allows authors and artists to give away their
work while retaining some commercial rights is being adapted for use across
Europe and beyond.

Lawyers, musicians and filmmakers gathered in Berlin on Friday for the
German introduction of the licenses, which were first drafted for use in
the United States in 2001 by Creative Commons, a Silicon Valley nonprofit
organization. The German debut followed the introduction of Creative
Commons licenses in Japan in March, in Finland in May and in Brazil on June
4.

Some 60 countries are expected to adapt Creative Commons licenses to their
jurisdiction, "and Germany is a critical part of that process," said
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University law professor who is the chairman
and co-founder of Creative Commons.

Creative Commons licenses will be introduced in the Netherlands next Friday
and in France by the end of the summer, with a goal of creating licenses
for all EU countries by year-end, Lessig said in an interview by phone last
week.

The idea behind Creative Commons licenses is to give musicians the freedom
to release their work to people who want to disseminate it or to remix the
music and try something new, Lessig said. Artists choose how they want to
share the work, specifying whether they want credit for reuse, whether they
want to be paid for commercial use or whether it is acceptable to change it.

"This is a different way of spreading or building upon musical works,"
Lessig said.

Lessig, who says that copyright and patent law is too restrictive, is the
author of "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock
Down Culture and Control Creativity," which he has made available on the
Internet for free. The bound version from Penguin Press costs $24.95. He
has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court against extending the length of
time that copyrights cover original works, a period that lasts 95 years in
the United States, and is an advocate of open-source software, which is
distributed freely on the Internet.

Businesses that own the rights or sell software, however, argue that
copyrights and patents reward creative and inventive people for their
talents and compensate companies that hire and promote them. The ease with
which digitized music and other digital files are shared on the Internet
has given the intellectual arguments new importance.

BjЖrn Hartmann, a German disc jockey and creator of the online music label
textone.org, which releases free music, said that while he believed
Europe's independent musicians and those with small or online labels would
benefit from Creative Commons licenses, most established performing artists
and composers in Germany would not, at least for now.

The German introduction of Creative Commons licenses, which Lessig
acknowledged was the "most difficult to date," is complicated by rules in
Germany that require musicians to give up rights to their work when they
sign up with agencies that collect royalties on their behalf.

The license has been adapted to take German copyright law into account,
requiring changes in things such as the definitions of terms and the extent
to which a work can be modified, said Till JДger, a German lawyer who
helped adapt the license for Germany.

But many performing artists in Germany sign up with a specialized local
royalty collection agency called the German Phono Association, and give up
some of their rights when they do so. And most composers or songwriters
sign up with another royalty collection agency, called the German Society
for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction Rights, and allow it to
negotiate on their behalf, JДger said.

While performers and composers who have signed up with collection agencies
cannot opt for a Creative Commons license because they no longer hold the
rights to their own works, Christiane Asschenfeldt, the international
coordinator for Creative Commons, said discussions have begun with the
Society for Musical Performing and Reproduction Rights to work out a
solution.

Society officials were not available for comment on Friday.

When composers sign up with the society, they sign over the rights not only
to a particular work but to all works in their repertoire, past, present
and future, said Thomas Dreier, a professor at the University of
Karlsruhe's Information Law Institute in Germany, who helped draft the
German implementation of the Creative Commons license.

Meanwhile, independent musicians in Germany as well as others - including
writers, filmmakers, scientists and photographers - can elect to use the
Creative Commons license.

Eight of the institutes that are part of the Max Planck Society for the
Advancement of the Sciences, Germany's leading organization for basic
scientific research, will be among the first to use the Creative Commons
license, Asschenfeldt said. Scientists will use the Creative Commons
license as a way of publicly disseminating research while reserving some
but not all rights.

European Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative sponsored by the European
Commission that involves three of the Max Planck institutes and 13 other
European partners, has also said it wants a Creative Commons license, she
said.

International Herald Tribune