ASCII by Jason Scott: Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons

(snippet from article)

So, ultimately, I am charging people for this documentary. I am charging $50. People ask me the material cost of the DVDs themselves and the packaging, and of course that's a fraction. But it doesn't count the other costs in making what goes on the DVDs. This price has caused some people to balk, understandably, in a world where you can buy "Dirty Dancing" for $3.99 in the aisle with the beach balls. That's the nature of things. The documentary website goes into the full feature set and explanation of how great the whole thing is and why you should buy a copy, so I won't do that here, other than to say, I've now seen the films over 200 times apiece, and I still watch some of them. For fun. But still, fifty bucks is fifty bucks.

Now, under copyright law in the United States, I have, as a content creator, an amazing arsenal of statutes and legal decisions at my disposal to make your life, assuming you are playing the part of someone copying my films without my permission, into a bitter fucking hell. I mean, a seriously bad, stinky, horrifying pit of suck. I can threaten you with years of jail. I can sue you in civil court while pursuing a criminal case against you on a state and federal level. If I am feeling somewhat kinky I can try and drag Interpol into the whole mess. And the laws out there, approved, let me attempt to have you put away for YEARS. Absolutely YEARS of your life for videotaping a copy of my film.

In other words, I have an enormous amount of incentive to be a jerk.

And yes, it's so easy, having now created something that has the potential to cost me a lot of money, to reach out and want to use these tools for my own end. Even though, in my own high school and college years, I made songs that used samples from professional productions, even if I took screengrabs from films and put them on a website to make a funny parody in 1995, I see my own work and the temptation is there to go "No, this is different. This is my stuff and you can't have my stuff without paying for it."

But that's not what I did. Instead, I stayed true to my belief system and licensed it under Creative Commons, giving away a lot of the tools that US copyright law grants me, because they're are By the Jerks, for the Jerks, and should perish from this Earth.

(commons'd from waxy.org)
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