Clever insights originally from Evan Prodromou on a public list:
CreativeCommons.org has two new featured initiatives:
CC+ -- A protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license.
CC0 -- A protocol enabling people to ASSERT that a work has no copyright or WAIVE any rights associated with a work.
I think the excitement surrounding these two efforts shows that developing protocols by taking "CC" and appending a mathematical symbol is a winning recipe for success.
So, humbly, I'd like to propose the following new projects:
CC÷ -- A protocol to enable sharing the royalties on a commercially-licensed work between all contributors.
CCπ -- A protocol providing a simple method to share the rights to dessert recipes.
CC× -- A protocol for licensing sex information.
CC> -- A protocol letting people compare the relative quality of freely-licensed works.
CCi -- A protocol that allows licensing works that don't (or can't) exist.
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2 comments:
Beautiful Evan.
CCR× -- A protocol for licensing prescription meds.
and re:
CCi
I don't get no respect... I'm so broke, my bank balance is stated in imaginary
numbers.
drew
> CC÷ -- A protocol to enable sharing the royalties on a
> commercially-licensed work between all contributors.
All the others were appropriately silly, of course, but this one sticks in my head as a potentially useful idea (for real).
One of the problems with the whole "statutory licensing" (is that the
right word?) idea is who should get paid and how much for a given work.
This is no problem for a Gimp "painting" created by one person (at least until it gets incorporated as the central element in a "collage" work -- have fun figuring out how to balance the fair rate for contributions on
that -- equally among contributors, even though one of them contributed
"the letter 'A' in URW Gothic font"? by *surface area*? Etc.
But I digress... that was the *easy* example.
What about a movie or a highly-interactive, rich-content computer game?
There could be dozens of people involved (or hundreds), and at very
different levels of involvement. Clearly, it's somewhat unfair to pay a director or a lead actor the same pay that you pay to a compositor or editor. Yet compositors and editors should be paid something.
Since in this case, at least, there is some hope of getting things
organized beforehand, I had thought that it might be reasonable to draw
up a "shares" plan, based on a task-breakdown of the project.
IOW, you decide you're going to pay "25%" to the entire sound production effort. Then, everything in the "sound" category, from voice actors to audio editors and foley artists has to come out of that 25%. Possibly, the people working on that particular task can decide on their own breakdown (if you have a "sound director", she might make that decision). The idea is that it should be possible to construct a
hierarchy in advance, based on the core contributors' idea of the
relative value of various components. There is a certain unavoidable rigidity imposed, of course -- you kind of need to guess right about those relative values, as it would be very awkward to change your mind in mid-production.
(Please remember at this point that this is a "semi-volunteer"/"bazaar"
effort and any one of these people could "flake" at any time -- this may pose an obstacle to my neat proposal above).
In any case, this sounds like something that would require at least a spreadsheet budget to work out. And of course, we're not talking about *actual* money here, we're talking about "phantom money" -- shares in whatever can be made from the work (which might turn out to be $1.25 -- or $12 million). If you had a system like CC+ to handle that "top line", then this is the problem of breaking it down and distributing it among
contributors.
There is also the issue of fixed-price services. Sometimes a project may contract work at a fixed price, rather than a share. This is awkward for a community project which doesn't really know what its budget in real
dollars should be, but there are cases where the funds can be raised.
Clearly, to the degree that they forego the risk of underpayment, such contributors should not deserve a cut of the "profit" from the work (that being the standard tradeoff for fixed-price deals). There are often hybrid deals in the industry, of course (things like "guild minimum plus 5% of profits", etc), and similar things could apply to community projects.
Which is about the limit of my thoughts on this, actually. But it's a complicated problem, deserving further thought.
So, what you suggest tongue-in-cheek might actually be a good idea to do something about. Perhaps hashing out a protocol and some budgeting sheets for task/value breakdowns? Perhaps an XML format for expressing
the final breakdown in terms of who gets what? Perhaps hooking that into the CC+ concept to automatically handle disperse funds correctly?
Cheers,
Terry
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