Defending the CCultural Heresy

image credit: barbarasays.com

What  Creative Commons wants is to be known as the only licensing scheme possible and available, as though it were the ultimate contractual instrument for regulating the culture industry. What pissed  Creative Commons off what the loss of the free advertising it got from a government seal of approval. They say it is the ministry’s losse, but in truth, the biggest loser here is CC.

Renato Pacca defends the decision to retire the CC license from the sites of all but two federal ministries.

• MinC » O site do Minc retirou o logo do Creative Commons. E daí?.

I have been reading aqbout how the MinC removed the  Creative Commons license from its site. As may be expected, the reaction was swift..

O GLOBO noted a certain “hubbub on the social networks” and interviewedthe assitant director of the CTS-FGV, Carlos Affonso, who says that removing the license simply means that rhe fact that content can be copied, with proper attribution, creates as “legal dilemma” over the problem of transparency, which could affect Brazil’s reputation abraod.

I disagree. The MinC did not just removethe logo from the site. It swapped the phrase “The content of this site is licensed under aCreative Commons liicense” in favor of: “Terms of Use: The content of this site, produced by the Miinistry, may be reproduced if the source is properly cited.”

This is the plain public domain 1.9 we are talking about. Can you think  of a clearer example?

The Ministry itself said “the removal of  Creative Commons from the front page of the site occurred because Brazilian law permits the ceding of authorship rights. There is no need for the Ministry to provide publicity to any specific campaign in this area. And it does not prevent CC from being used by anyone interested in it.” Perfectly said..

So what is the problem? Why the hubbub?  Creative Commons has the ambition of becoming a new platform – and judging from all the noise it make, the ONLY platform. The terms of service on the site of the Ministry are legally valid and suffice to permit free reuse, with due credit to the source, without any need to stamp this simple concept with  CC’s consumer branding.

Ronaldo Lemos, director of CC Brasil and the CTS-FGV, went so far as to say “from a legal point of view, the terms of use they deployed mean absolutely nothing. Those who rely on them encounter enormous legal uncertainites”. Say what? From the legal standpoint, the terms of use mean exactly what they say. What legal uncertainties? The content is freely usable, so long as the source is cited. How much freer can the user be?

According to Lemos, quite a bit. “The rights afforded b  CC are much broader and better drafted, covering collaborative usa, the further development of derivative ideas, dissmenation and so on. So the MiniC loses lot with this change”. He sounds like a used car salesman, doesn’t he?

Lemos, whos has run the center for years, has always struck me as somewhat vacant between the ears and given to brute-force hyperbole.;

I find it amazing for a Brazilian citizen to come out and say that a bill drafted by U.S. lobbyists not elected by Brazilians should become the law of the land.

It’s nonsene. If you want to reuse,  recombine or remix the site content to create derivative works? Dissmenation of the work is guarantedd. What  Creative Commons wants is to be known as the only licensing scheme possible and available, as though it were the ultimate contractual instrument for regulating the culture industry. What pissed  Creative Commons off what the loss of the free advertising it got from a government seal of approval. They say it is the ministry’s losse, but in truth, the biggest loser here is CC.

No one ever asks who is really behind CC. What interest are in play? Who finances those interests? It is easy to call Brazilian law restrictive and clamor for greater freedom for digital culture, but it is quite difficult to protect the rights of the author. CC is a great marketing scheme with a lot of fans among performers who have not yet achieved success — for which reason they have nothing to lose — or who are so successful they can afford to cede some of their royalties.

The fact is that it pleases their fans when they pass up a chance to make money, providing them with defending “cultural democracy” — a reputation that certainly cannot hurt the effectiveness of their marketing and publicity, and, as a consequence … their profitability?

These are nothing but publicity stunts, carefully plainned. The big stars give very little away, it seems, and never espouse the CC orthodoxy wholeheartely After all, we are talking business here, and business means money.

Attorney João Carlos Muller gave a great interview to  O GLOBO a while back..Read over the parts reprduced below if you want to understand why this is not a struggle between the good cultural democrats, i.e., Creative Commons, and the evil Industry. There are many other commercial interests in play.

I will get to that when I get a chance. I think the lady nails it. I have long had some of the same impressions — especially after that BloggerCon I went to in Palo Alto — where, by the way, some asshole A-list blogger stole the cab we had called.

“A Warner acabou de cancelar o direito deles (do Google) de acesso às obras no YouTube, porque achou que estava sendo mal remunerada. Isso é um problema que não é meu. Essas autopistas não têm pedágio, mas têm outdoors, e muitos. E quanto mais tráfego, maior a quantidade de outdoors. O que você acha que é mais caro: um outdoor na (Rodovia) Dutra ou na Friburgo-Rio? Quanto maior o tráfego, maior a remuneração. Se pudessem, nem cobrariam o pedágio. Porque o internauta não gosta de pagar. Na verdade, ninguém gosta. Mas vamos lá: o cara com a publicidade ganha o bastante e muito bem. Quanto mais barato o tráfego, maior ele será. Quanto mais coisas circularem e quanto menos eu tiver de pagar pelo tráfego, melhor

Então as empresas de comunicação são contra o direito de autor. É por isso. O direito deles é totalmente industrial, as patentes deles, é a Microsoft, etc. O software eles defendem com unhas e dentes, mas o direito de autor mesmo, para eles é um porre. Quem está por trás de tudo isso? Se fizermos uma pesquisa boba, veremos quem é que financia o Creative Commons. Vai na Fundação Getúlio Vargas, vê se eles abrem quem é que põe dinheiro no centro de cidadania a tecnologia. E aí você vai ter surpresas interessantíssimas. Nunca vai ser nada diretamente, mas é por aí.”

 

The Demise of the Minister of CCulture

A German company takes out a worldwide trademark on the term rapadura, a form of unrefined sugar in hard blocks that has been made in the Brazilian Northeast. They intend it for use as a brand name for granulated organic sugar.

They have the absolute balls to try to enforce their trademark, too. If it were up to them, old men in village markets could no longer sell rapadura. They would have to call it something else.

This actually happened.

There was a melodramatic but utlimately  banal article in yesterday’s Ilustrada section of the Folha de S. Paulo — there are still giving  a frre subscription that we never asked for — on the recent dropping of the Creative Commons license from the Web sites of the Ministry of Culture here in Brazil.

Under the previous MiniC, led by the all-time great songwriter Gilberto Giil, Creative Commons had been something of a holy crusade, with the support and encouragement of the CTS-FGV, the local counterpart — some would say clone — of CYBR.LAW.HARVARD and CYBER.LAW.STANFORD, where the strange notion that giving up your authorship rights and responsibilities is an enlightened thing to do.

Currently, only two of the thirty-odd ministries of the federal government license their content in this way. It seems like a redundant gesture anyhow, as public documents are just that — public — in the first place.

A major advocate for the policy at the ministry was this Jose Murilo fellow, who promoted it as the Brazil editor for Gloval Voices Online — without properly disclosing that he was a Brazilian civil servant. He reported merely that he was the worldwide Webmaster of Santo Daime, a religious cult focused on the drinking of yage, or ayahuasca, or hoasca, as you prefer.

Murilo worked hard to promote the image of Brasil as the poster child for Creative Commons — although he often left himself open to analogies between this treatment of intelectual property and the practice of grilagem — the xpropriation of real property

The Folha personalizes the debate as a disagreement between Gil and another all-time musical great, Caetano Veloso, who defends the track record of the local version of ASCAP, known as ECAD.

The substance of the article is essentially the two founding Tropicalistas trading insults and otherwise expressing personal animus, rather than any arguments of substance.It’s a pseudoserious gossip page.