Pearl Jam's Embrace of Creative Commons

Pearl Jam's decision to use a CreativeCommons 'copyleft' license and encourage the online sharing of the video to their latest single flies in the face of the music industry's staunch opposition to file-sharing.

For years the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and our local equivalent the RIANZ have been foaming at the mouth about digital "piracy". According to them music fans are "stealing" by sharing songs encoded in the .mp3 digital audio format with each other using peer-to-peer (P2P) network software.

This internet sharing phenomenon is arguably as natural a progression from friends borrowing and dubbing each other's CDs as email is a progression from posting letters. I have yet to see a furious media release from a postal company claiming email users are stealing stamps. Yet there is about as much justification for this as for the music industry's position on file-sharing.

I doubt any artist ever expected to get paid *every singe time* someone hears one of their songs. Nobody walks around a party charging their guests for their purchase of each song that plays on the stereo. Yet the salvo of lawsuits the RIAA have launched against individual P2P users implies they expect ISPs to do the internet equivalent by policing potential "intellectual property" theft carried out through their network.

RIAA claims they are beating ordinary internet users with their legal billy club to protect the copyright and financial interests of their artists. But is this really their motivation? Doubt was cast on this by the results of a class action taken by hundreds of small time artists against major labels (and RIAA members) that were witholding royalties from them. Further doubt was cast when it emerged that artists whose songs were being furiously swapped on P2P networks were selling *more* CDs at a time when CD sales as a whole were slumping.

A much more likely explanation for the RIAA position is this: their member corporations - who between them currently profit from the vast majority of global music sales - were terrified by the potential decentralisation of music promotion. With access to worldwide audiences through the internet artists could potentially record and promote albums and concerts without the financial backing, industry contacts or marketing clout of the major labels. The labels and the media corporations like AOL/TimeWarner and Sony that had spent up large to aquire their rosters of artists and the copyright to their back catalogues faced the prospect of losing their middleman role and the profits it allowed them to extract from artists and audiences.

As the PR and legal battles raged between the industry and P2P companies like Napster artists like Courtney Love started asking if they could support the internet distribution paradigm while still making a living from music. Thus the stage was set for the emergence of CreativeCommons. Inspired by the open source software licenses and documentation created by groups like the Free Software Foundation law professor Lawrence Lessig and engaged in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case over the extension of copyright, Lessig believed a copyright system that allowed and even encouraged sharing was in order. Launched in 2001 CreativeCommons soon had a set of legally-binding licenses that allowed artists to choose whether to allow commercial use and/ or sampling and remixing of their work and a set of software tools to help artists tag their digitized works with their chosen license.

Now, in 2006, the CreativeCommons message is starting to pierce into the mainstream. Already infamous for their battle over concert prices with aggressive monopolists Ticketek, Seattle grunge legends Pearl Jam recently licensed the video clip for their latest single 'Life Wasted' under a CreativeCommons license. They encourage their fans to share the clip by whatever means as long as they don't make money out of the trade and have reserved the right to sample and remix the video and the song. This is yet another nail in the coffin for the recording industry's argument that ever stricter "intellectual property" protection like the draconian Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US is necessary to protect artists.

Over the last couple of years localisation projects have been set up to translate the licenses into the local legalese of various countries. These projects have now come together under the banner of iCommons (International Commons) which includes more than 46 completed localisations. The Aotearoa CreativeCommons project began last year as is looking for volunteers to help with promoting the concept, organising public meetings, benefit shows and other local events and building our website (currently a test page is up at ). To get involved join our email list and introduce yourself. Free people, free culture, free planet!

Related

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5913

http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-nz