Those DeWolfes Podcast Episode 7: This Show is Creative Commons

Those DeWolfes Podcast Intro --

In Episode 7, Mike and Cheryl tell you everything you need to know about Creative Commons plus chat about why we use it for this podcast and for other content. We also dish dirt on Creative Commons "enemies" like George Lucas, Walt Disney and, sadly, the Beastie Boys. Finally, we talk about how to find CC licensed content and dream about the killer app built to find it.

Episode References:

• the reason for this episode: CreativeCommons.org
• the official, awkward Creative Commons search which even specifies, "Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. CC has no control over the results that are returned. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license."
• my favourite source for images, Flickr. Use the Advanced Search and scroll waaaay down to limit your results to CC content or just browse Creative Commons. Flickr also houses The Commons, a collection of the world's public photo collections -- these images are generally public domain (check the rights statement) and offer another rich resource to tap for content.
• Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster copyright tangle with Associated Press; his iconic Andre the Giant OBEY image.
• Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique licensing for samples would have cost them $19.8M; they only made $2.5M on the album's sales.
• While Dublin Core offers a descriptive tag for licensing, there is no similar HTML image tag for license. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
• If you learn visually, there's a great overview of Creative Commons embedded below -- the original is on Slideshare.

 
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Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode Seven of Those DeWolfes.
Talking about creative commons.
Yes. Creative commons is an alternate license structure to copyright.
It’s the Disney lawyers’ greatest nightmare.
(Laughs) And Wikipedia’s friend. Speaking of Wikipedia, they ask that if you share an image on there that it be simply CC by so the basic attribution or CC by SA, which is share alike. And we’re going to talk about each of the kinds of licenses and what you can do with them and why we use them both for creating content and for finding content.
I mean, you look at the web and it’s no longer a thing of text files and cold stuff. It’s all glitz and flash and pop culture tie-ins and nice spinning logos. All that sort of stuff has to be conjured up somehow. You can either make it yourself, which if you have a lot of material to put in through becomes impractical, or you can find it. Lots of places sell this sort of stuff. Lots of pop culture elements are locked down through copyrights so you can’t get any of this stuff. And the good old alternative to those are avenues of making it yourself, buying it or not being able to use it is creative commons.
So creative commons has several layers of licenses. All of them have the by, B-Y, which is attribution. And as a creator, you get to select how you are credited for that work. So for example, my Flickr photos that are creative commons, I ask for a credit of “by Cheryl DeWolfe.” If I were doing something else, I may ask for a slightly different wording or I may ask for my Flickr handle name to be used instead of my full name. But I’ve chosen to go with my full name. It looks a little bit more professional.
Yeah. I mean, I’m pretty prone to flagging stuff in Flickr as creative commons. Likewise, I theoretically would have loved to do that with YouTube but, unfortunately, YouTube had a … Okay, back it up by a half sec. YouTube had something really cool where if you took multiple pieces of creative commons materials and stitched them together into something longer and used their inline editing, then you can take that work and then make it creative commons. And there’s a bit of hoopla as they announced this and said, “Hooray! We’re in kind of separate creative commons,” which was terrific but the little fine print they forgot to say was only if your account is in good standing, which means that with YouTube, if you have copyrighted material like you took a “Daily Show” clip, which I did, and put it on your YouTube feed, you get a strike against you. Three strikes and you’re out. But one strike means you’re not in good standing, and the only way you can get rid of that taint is to cancel your account and set up a brand new account.
Not friendly, YouTube.
Yeah. So now, I can’t play well and use creative commons on YouTube unless I’m dishonest and take my account, knock it out and replace it or band in the current account and replace it.
Yeah. So attribution is the first level. The next level is the CC by SA. So SA stands for share alike. Now, the real little gotcha with share alike is that any content that you label as such, when it’s used by anyone else, even remixed, re-cut, whatever, that content then has to be licensed in the same way. So this is sort of like the open source …
Derivative code.
Yeah.
Open source has a lot of elements where derivative code and derivative outcomes of derivative applications in a lot of the different licensing structures for open source carry the open source aspect. So in other words, if you take something that is open source code and you use it in your application as kind of an intrinsic part, that main set application built on that foundation is also open source, which kind of raise the hackles of Microsoft who founded the whole bunch of material on open source software. A lot of the stuff to do with networking and Internet protocols and things like that are founded on open source material, open source code, so their code is a derivative work of that and so big elements of Microsoft and its Windows products and other products should be considered open source. But that’s something the lawyers can duke it out well.
Yeah. And that is lawyers do not like, DO NOT like creative commons for the most part because, to them, it’s a great big gray area. At freelance camp, I listened to a lawyer talk about copyright issues and intellectual property, and when someone in the audience raised creative commons, he immediately brushed it off as “We’re not going there.” So that pretty much told me exactly what I needed to know about that particular lawyer, but I think it’s a common feeling.
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you talk about the clear black and white of intellectual property and ownership, you can establish ownership. But if you say it’s creative commons or some shade of creative commons, suddenly it becomes one of those things that’s a lot more muddy. And what happens if, you know, it gets into the whole question of how do you make a profit from it, how do you defend a brand, what happens if it’s abused, all that sort of messiness that comes that, of course, a lawyer wouldn’t like.
Yeah. So, the next level is CC by ND. The ND stands for no derivatives?
No derivatives.
Or no derivations. So basically, you can’t change it, which means when you’re borrowing a photo or using a photo from Flickr, if it’s creative commons and it’s CC by ND, that means you cannot crop it, you can’t blur a part of it, you can’t tweak the colors, you cannot do anything to that photo.
That one ticks me off because it’s a *[07:16]. It says that what is there, even if you don’t like it or doesn’t fit overall …
Well, but it’ll ask the photographer to keep the photo as they intended it to be seen.
Yeah but they already have it as it’s intended to be seen. If you’re using it, you’re taking it from their intended viewers.
But it’s their choice to license it as they see fit.
Yeah and my choice based on their choice is to not use it.
Yeah, that’s true. When I do my searches on there – we’ll talk about that in a minute – I do limit it away from that. Next level is CC by NC, which means non-commercial. This one does get into some very gray areas because it goes a little bit too far the other way. It’s really hard to say that, you know, “I can’t use it on my blog because I’ve got Google AdWords running on there.”
Yeah, and dot.coms came about because the com in dot.com is for commercial. So if you’ve got a website that’s a dot.com and, by extension, almost every website except for educational websites, even then, universities are money mills …
Even educationals have been challenged on that.
So almost everything is commercial. So non-commercial basically says put it in a scrapbook for your Christmas present. Don’t …
And I’ve been known to use the license but it’s more to say, “Here, bloggers can use it.” I mean, people are always free to ask “Can I use this in this instance?” And the owner of the photo or material is always free to say, “Yeah, go ahead” on a case-by-case basis. The licensing should make it a little easier, but in the case of the non-commercial, it really doesn’t. It goes the other way. So then you get the really complex ones. So you get …
The compound ones.
The compound ones where you get CC by NCSA, which is attribution non-commercial share alike which is really limiting but not quite as limiting as the CC by NCND, which is non-commercial no derivatives. So really, you can’t do much at all with that photo. It’s just as good as locked down.
Yeah, and those really tick me off because I have been using graphic editing programs since the 80s and if I have a chance to mess with an image, I will mess with an image and tweak it out. And the idea that I can’t tweak it out, I can’t change a detail or I can’t make a parody of it or I can’t use it in bigger sense if I should have the rights to use it, it really ticks me off that’s it’s so restrictive that it becomes pointless. And, you know, I actually was searching around for photos of stuff for Victoria and I got so ticked off with the different sort of the landmines of what photos were available and which ones were creative commons, and creative commons to a point where I could use them on my website so the photos I like, at the end of the day, ‘cause I couldn’t use them, I just got ticked off, I grabbed my camera, I went down to the same location and took the same shot and said, “Good. I’ve got the same shot and it’s mine.”
And sometimes that’s the only answer.
Yeah.
Now, of course, it’s not just photos to which you can apply creative commons. It’s any content that you create.
Yeah. Creative commons is a cool enough open source so just like code has open source and license and everything else, creative commons is any creative work that’s beyond just application code.
So this podcast, for example, we license it pretty openly with CC by. So if you credit Mike and Cheryl DeWolfe as the creators, you can remix portions of this into your own podcast or presentation as you see fit.
Yeah, like here, let me just give you a little bit of an example. For example, if I were to say, “I love this blog! He’s my favorite podcaster!” You can now cut that chunk and put it into your podcast. Or you can say this, “He’s always (add something).” That’s a total bunch of gibberish. You could use it anywhere. “Best movie ever!”
There you go. Have fun with that the next time you write a low-budget film. So, you know, you can have a lot of fun with creative commons materials. A lot of people will license their blog posts, various articles out on the web, whole books have been done in creative commons. It really is a great resource. Now, the trick is tapping into that resource.
Yeah. I love the stuff that Cheryl said about creative commons. Somebody actually effectively admitted it in their details that they had used creative commons to assemble an entire book from Wikipedia entries. And it was amazing. Well, it’s 80,000 words and I trust it about as much as any other textbook so …
But they were selling it on Amazon books.
Yeah. So that’s the thing with creative commons. And it’s similar to the open source model again in that even though you don’t own it and you aren’t the creator, in some of these license and schemes of creative commons, you have the right to take it and sell it for profit.
Yeah. And that is something that I didn’t know when I started using creative commons. I had done a knitting pattern and I had licensed that as just CC by because I didn’t really understand. And, sure enough, someone took that pattern and started selling copies of it on eBay ...
Without your credit.
… without attribution, without anything else. I mean, the only thing that saved me was that I could say, you know, there’s no attribution here. They weren’t crediting me back with creating it. They were claiming it for their own. But still, the fact that they had thought that they could sell it and, in fact, were selling it, which annoyed me further because why wasn’t I selling it.
Yeah. They made money and she didn’t. You know, the other thing I saw there, and this is a little bit of a tangent, but public domain.
Oh yeah, public domain is another ...
Again, Walt Disney’s cybernetic head is hating the idea of public domain because so many works out there have lapsed into public domains. And creative commons means that the point of creation you name it as creative commons and open to sharing. Public domain is something so old that it lapses from being a copyrighted work owned by somebody, and this is different from country to country and medium to medium, into being something that becomes public domain so anyone can own it. Which is why if I want to go out and make a Sherlock Holmes story tomorrow, I could. But, by the same general rules that I grew up with for public domain, theoretically you could take Steamboat Willy, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, and work with it. You could take The Hobbit and the first Lord of the Rings book and those would now, by the old rules, be public domain. In the UK, there is something where … This is usually talking about written works, songs, later became movies and television shows. But in the UK, they have something for industrial designs. And this was really wild in that there was a lawsuit last year, where back in the 70s, George Lucas was cash-strapped and he went to the UK. A lot of his props were built in the UK. People who kind of did the intricacies of storm trooper outfits, this one guy did that back in the 70s for Lucas. He did all the work and he kept all the molds and, eventually, word caught on that he had these and he could produce storm trooper outfits basically on demand, and he started doing that. And then the heavy fist of Lucas Films dropped on him and said no he couldn’t. At the end of the day, they went to court. There was a huge expensive legal battle that ensued but because of UK laws on industrial designs, the copyright on those had lapsed something like 20 years after the fact. So after 1997, that guy was free and clear to create storm trooper outfits from the industrial design because …
In the UK.
In the UK. And that’s the thing. So now, it’s a gray market item. You can buy it from the UK. But once you start kind of connecting it to North American markets, then it becomes a copyright issue, and Lucas will come up and sic Jar-Jar on your ass.
Aah! (Laughs)
Wait! Okay, on that note, “Me so being sued by George Lucas (in voice of Jar-Jar).” See! That can be creative commons. You’re welcome to use that.
That’s nasty. Where were we before we got on to the tangent of George Lucas’ no-talent us plan?
Well, I just took this slight detour on public domain.
Oh, right. Well, public domain is what brought us Pride and Prejudice with zombies and all those books that kind of went crazy last year, and also the reworked version of … was it Tom Sawyer?
Yeah, where it’s a robot.
No. Well, that was the kick starter one. But what started that with their tongue in their cheek was the version that was being used in schools that had removed the “N” word and replaced it with “slave.”
Yeah, which is pretty mean because my huge rant on that, just a side tangent, is “N” word refers to somebody’s origin and the color of their skin. “Slave” refers to the fact that they’re always owned by somebody as property. And you know what? After the Civil War, you can shed the slave demarcation, except in the revised work of Huckleberry Finn. And that really pisses me off.
Yeah. I mean, that’s another podcast altogether. So, licensing … finding content. Creative commons site does have search options. I, however, do not like them. I don’t find them useful. I don’t like the interface and I don’t find them to be successful in helping me to get where I want to be.
Flickr has the option.
Flickr is fantastic but you have to go in to … You have to create your search and then you get the option for advanced search. And then in advanced search, you want to scroll way down to the bottom so you can limit it to creative commons works, and in there, you can also select whether you want it to be works that can be used commercially and works that you can modify. And ticking both of those will leave out the non-commercial no derivatives items.
Yeah. Now, ironically, the granddaddy of all image archives is Google Images. You won’t believe how many Google image searches there are. And those are for people who are trawling for content they can pick up and use in another place. But Google Images, as of this recording, has no way to filter or sense for creative commons characteristics.
No, which is why it’s so rampant that people just thieve images. It’s like, “Well, I found it searching by Google. I guess it’s okay.”
Yeah. And if you found it searching by Google, you have to assume you can’t use it at all unless you go and check the image and see if the page in the image is creative commons, and if it is creative commons, you then got to take the sniff test – Is it actually creative commons or did they just steal the image and called it creative commons? Oh, and one interesting side note on this searching for images via Google Images. If you do that, you got to watch out ‘cause a lot of people have implanted useful images inside of malware sites.
Yeah.
And we got snagged with that. Now rebranding, I wanted to find something to kind of kick start us for the rebranding. I thought rocket ships and ray guns was a thought, kind of retro-futurism in blueprints. I found only one source for rocket ship blueprints. Actually, it was one source but it was in a dozen places and all of them reeked of malware, so it totally jiggered my machine.
And I’ve seen other people get hit by that as well, sometimes just launching a page that has an image that’s got the embedded malware. It’s just brutal. So beware.
Yeah. So if you want to look for creative commons stuff and you want to keep your computer safe, avoid Google Images.
I mean, there are other search engines out there and other places where you can search for creative commons items. There are lots of places that have creative commons music as well.
Yeah, the Free Sound Archive.
Free Music Archive.
Free Music Archive, the one where we got some of our … Didn’t we get our clips for this show from there?
I got some of our clips from actually archive.org, so the Internet archive. The licensing, that’s a bit dodgy even though they may say it’s free and open, it often isn’t. It pays to do a little bit of research. I found one song that I loved and I thought, “You know, this sounds really familiar.” And, sure enough, a quick search discovered it was from a 1950s musical and so I couldn’t use that one.
Again that’s that thing where even if the person you’re getting from says it’s creative commons, you got to make sure that it actually was originally creative commons or public domain.
Or public domain. And, I mean, I think archive.org calls theirs “the commons” or something along those lines. But archive.org at least has curators who will go through … You can flag an item if you believe that it is copyrighted and they will go through and check. And they’ll pull items that are requested to be removed. And that’s the other thing is that if you do find that you’ve licensed something and it is being misused, you can usually go through and talk to people about it. Most people who use creative commons have a little bit of a clue so they’re a little bit easier to reason with than someone who’s just found the image through Google. But sometimes even creators of major works don’t check.
Yeah, like the best example is Shepard Farley thing. Fairly? Farley?
Fairey.
Fairey. He’s the guy who did the Barack Obama “Hope” poster. He’s a street artist so he took his origin kind of like the Andre the Giant Obey image and turned it into the “Obey” thing he did. The “Hope” poster for Obama, his source was an AP newswire photo. So even though it’s a very derivative piece based on this photo, because the original piece is copyrighted, his creative commons or kind of more liberal derivative version wasn’t clear to be used as creative commons. It wasn’t clear the copyright angle.
Yeah. Basically, the Associated Press and the photographer who took the original photo basically threw him over the coals over the whole issue and it just blew out of proportion.
Yeah. That’s a good cautionary tale but the good thing with creative commons is you can use creative commons to kind of propel the popularity of what work you do. And because it’s creative commons, it means the impetus is to share instead of hold on to it, to mix it and reuse it instead of holding on to it. Ironically, rap and the Beastie Boys … The Beastie Boys are so big on being protective of the copyright but the amount of copyrighted material they’ve sampled in their stuff that is not at all creative commons dwarfs the amount of money they’ve ever collected as a band.
Yeah. Well, a good example on that one is for their Paul’s Boutique album. They were way ahead of their time in what they were sampling and pulling together on that album. If they had gotten copyright clearance for everything on there under today’s rulings, I think it would have cost something like $25 million. It’s a ridiculous number. I’ll pull that out for the show notes.
Yeah. So it’s ironic that some practitioners of really heavy-handed copyright rules will also totally avoid copyright on the way in. That said, if you have creative commons stuff, creative commons stuff is more likely to be shared out. Like you see the Nyan Cat stuff and all the stuff making the round on YouTube, all these sort of Internet memes they get a real sort of booster engine effect if they’re creative commons because then people are really feeling liberal in sharing it and also …
I’m not sure that so much works. A meme is a meme, it just goes.
Yeah, but a meme can’t be shut down easily. If it’s copyrighted, it can be slammed down pretty fast.
I don’t think it can. I think memes travel far and wide, regardless of copyright.
Well, I … Yeah, okay.
And maybe in spite of.
I’d like to agree to disagree on this because what I see with YouTube is that YouTube is really quick with its take down notices.
YouTube is brutal. Again, YouTube, you’re not friendly. But that’s another story. But going back to Flickr and my photos, I try to put … I mean, I have like 11,000 or something photos on there. They’re not all creative commons and they never will be because there are a lot of photos of family and friends that are just never going to get tagged that way. However, I do try and put a few out a month that are creative commons and that … It does increase my page views and increases people who find me, I make more connections, I find some fantastic other photographers who are using my work, and it’s really quite interesting to see where the photos can end up – illustrating other people’s blogs or I’ve had some that have been included in educational books, which is fantastic, and I’ve contributed to Wikimedia. So it’s nice to have that ability to contribute to the wider community and bring views in, going back to the passive income of last week. (Laughs)
Like I said, it’s a way to propel popularity.
Yeah, that’s true. So, the other thing is that, and we just sort of touched on this with our little astonished jaw-dropping over the person who pulled together Wikipedia articles into a book. That seems to be like exceptionally ballsy to me. But there are ways that you can take creative commons works and build on them to build something that is even better than what was there before, maybe draw two or three ideas together into a longer piece.
What you need to do is to bank shot or use an open source app to filter and better put together creative commons material.
Yeah. Well, see the killer app for me and, anyone out there who is developing killer apps, please build a better creative commons search engine, something that just crawls the web looking for CC licenses.
Oh, well see, that’s doable. Look, I’m going to give away the killer app way to do it. What you do is W3 org has in it the directives about what you do for controls of the images. Right now, there’s no capacity in an image tag – I’ll go and double check and put it in the show notes if I’m wrong on this – to put in the rights connected to a particular image. But it’s pretty easy to put in rights equal “the terms” and then tack that in and when you search for the image, like the search engine could do and crawl, it could then take that whole image tag, read for that and say this one’s got CC rights and then make it generally apparent.
Yeah. Even if it meant content creators registering with the site to say, “Yeah, my stuff is creative commons, crawl it.”
Yeah. Well, see I’m more thinking you just pack it into the code in the same way search engine optimization if you have titles and alt tags that’s worth a lot more. What I’m saying is if you added in something for rights negotiation in the tag, it can be read in at the same time. The problem is that’s not what the killer app has to do. The people developing and putting in images have to put that in the images and then the killer app can read it. It’s like HTML was developed before the browser was.
Yeah. It’s not perfect but there’s got to be a way to do it. And if you have a favorite way of finding creative commons or if you are a creative commons creator, we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment.
Leave in the comment in the website, which is thosedewolfes.com/shows/7.html.
Yeah, just the number seven.
And put in comments and we’ll amend our show notes to include your stuff.
Yeah. Hey, thanks for listening to Those DeWolfes podcast.
You can find us on the web at www.thosedewolfes.com, I know it’s grammatically incorrect but whatever, or facebook.com/thosedewolfes.
Or you can find us on twitter @thosedewolfes or if you prefer to listen to us separately, we are @dewolfe001 for Mike or @victriviaqueen for Cheryl, it’s a long story. Thanks for listening. See you next week.