[spectre] IHT on Lessig at WOS3, Berlin, June 10-12, 2004

[Inke Arns]

Forwarded by:   	"Volker Grassmuck" <vgrass at rz.hu-berlin.de>
Date forwarded: 	Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:22:09 +0200
From:           	"Vera Franz" <vfranz at osieurope.org>
Date sent:      	Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:29:12 +0200
Subject:        	[wos] [ipr] IHT on Lessig at WOS


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.

Björn 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 Jäger, 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, Jäger 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



Inke Arns
http://www.v2.nl/~arns