On the 8th of April the FC UK constitution passed unanimously at the FC UK general assembly at the Limehouse in London. As Deptford.TV is publishing the content under the Creative Commons License and the Art Libre License the discussion around the rights issue on digital media is a main focus of the research into new forms of film-making.
the creative commons license should also be looked at critically. creative commons looks at culture as rough material whereas the artlibre license, see http://artlibre.org or the general public license see http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft where a new version is just writen are looking at culture as work of art - i prefer the phrasing of the artlibre people. but, on the other side cc is much more a "standart" worth going for... if talking cc, it should be made clear about which license your talking, because clearly not all of them are as open as they assume to be (with taking a parallel approach to the free software movement) - my prefered licence is by-sa as it is similar to the general public license or artlibre license. regarding the discussion about non-commercial - i think it is not a good idea to say that documentaries are non commercial. in my eyes they shurely are - what makes it interesting for doc filmmaker to use by-sa, which allows commercial use, is that a pool of material is generated out of which doc filmmakers can bennefit - and at the same time taking away the power of the big media players over their archives - similar to the free/open software movement sharing their source code, benefiting the community and givin microsoft a hard time... please see also some thoughts in the next two hidden posts on why not nc from the free culture network see http://freeculture.org.uk also look at: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
an email exchange regarding the non-commercial issue with rufus pollock from the open knowledge foundation:
First, a by-sa license is clearly 'freer' than a by-sa-nc in that it places fewer restrictions on the use of the work. In general this is a good thing since it means fewer occassions on which people have to /ask permission/. In fact I would go as far as to argue that a nc license is not really an open license (as defined in the open knowledge definition: http://www.okfn.org/okd/) Second is all commercial usage bad? I have a friend who made a very alternative documentary about Chavez and distributes it for free. At the same time he has received payments when it has aired by commercial tv stations (they often pay even when they don't need to). This would make his work 'commercial' but it seems a far cry from, say, use in a coca-cola advert. Do you really want to prevent that kind of usage? If you do you've just cut out most of the main avenues for 'serious' reuse of your work -- ultimately most documentary makers would like to see their stuff get out to a wide an audience as possible and that means broadcast on a commercial network. Third for the types commercial usage that I imagine you would most object to (e.g. adverts) the makers would probably not want to have 'sa' their work. Therefore they would need to come and relicense from you and at that point you are in the same position as with an nc license. Thus overall I think there are significant gains in terms of greater freedom for reuse, the benefits of being truly 'open' and its consequent benefits for making the content commons, while the downsideis minimal.
answer from saul albert from the living archives project on the open knowledge foundation mailinglist:
Robert Altman calls the GPL a union - I don't think it's a union. I think it's a guild. High value labourers can form guilds within which they share their labour and knowledge and guard it from uninitiates and potential exploiters. They can do this because the high value of their labour and knowledge is capable of generating a surplus that is of most use to the guild as a community if it's shared. Unions came into their own as organised groups of low-value labourers whose only real leverage with bosses was/is the refusal of their low-value labour. There's no surplus to go round, no 'regulation' of labour, just the start-stop button of a strike. Information proles don't own anything - and we are all information proles. Even the CC-using musicians are information proles when they go to the supermarket and get their clubcard scanned, or their information is shuttled around and cross-referenced by various semi-privatised government services. But we're not organised in a union of information proles with this understanding of the relationship between the information we create and the information we excrete - all of which has value. Were we're sold the idea that we can have a 'piece of the action', but I think it's misdirection. With CC-BA-NC-SA or whatever other combination of CC licenses, I think they do little more than gentrify the debate over the iniquities of global copyright law, and have nothing *whatsoever* to do with 'commons'. about 'freedom' in CC/NC discussions that I think are best dealt with by leaving the detail out and focusing on material movement of value through systems of ownership. That is a class issue, and it's really not very difficult to explain or understand. In the interest of moving the discussion somewhere more useful, I think the best argument for dropping NC in most contexts is the packaging issue. Debian works *really really well* because it deals with packaging exquisitely - formally and legally. If you're running debian or a derivative, try 'sudo apt-get install anarchism' for a great practical demonstration of knowledge packaging. Anyway, I don't need to start on that old chestnut. It's pretty clearly argued here: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html