Jason Scott, the archivist of TextFiles.com, has spent four years putting together BBS: The Documentary. As the documentary was being put together, I’d wondered whether he’ll be releasing it under a Creative Commons license, but thought, ‘no way—think of the time he put in..’ It’s now available for order for $50.
And it’s under a Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike 2.0 license. Wow. Jason has posted a great, inspirational essay about his rationale: Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons:
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. [...]
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.
It was in some ways a tough decision, because you want to “protect” yourself, but then you realize you’re not really “protecting” anything; all you’re doing is being a paranoid twitch-bag. And once you realize this, then it becomes a little easier.
The eminently quotable Mark Pilgrim makes an appearance in the comments:
When my son grows up, if he has a homework assignment on the history of computers, I will point him to your documentary and tell him that he’s allowed and encouraged to take your footage and remix it. I’ll tell him that he’s allowed and encouraged to take the sound effects from your DVD and sample them in OpenGarageBand 2015 and create music around them. [...]
And I’ll be sure to tell him that it wasn’t always like this, that when I was growing up, there was no open content. And maybe — just maybe — there will be so much open content in the world by then that he won’t believe me.
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