March 7, 2005 21:16 | Culture / WebTech

Music makers WANT to share

Creative Commons search index breakdown:

It appears that people licensing audio have chosen to offer more liberal terms than average while those licensing still and moving images have chosen less liberal terms than average.

And THAT, my friends, is VERY telling. VERY telling indeed. I'm looking at you, "the music industry".

(This also make me think out loud about the dichotomy between the aural and the visual "brainframes" and how we, as a culture spurned on by electricity, are moving from the latter to the former.)

Comments
1- John Poisson

Come on Boris, on se calme, ostie!

While the difference in license terms for picture and sound content is mildly interesting, don't forget to account for the volume of content that inherits its license terms from a set-it-and-forget-it user preference (e.g. most CC-licensed pictures in Flickr). Doesn't this skew the results? And doesn't this dilute the notion that All People Are Always Thinking About Sharing All Their Stuff With The Whole World?

More importantly, these are people who know what CC is and their use of any kind of CC license amounts to tacit support for the concept. Their (our!) relative liberalness with re-use rights has almost nothing to do with the music industry we all know and love to hate.


Tu fumes quoi, mon crisse?
:)

First of all, I do agree and don't buy the "All People Are Always Thinking About Sharing All Their Stuff With The Whole World" notion, at least not in western "societies". More often than not I get almost violent reactions to the suggestion of sharing. Quite disheartening.

However I disagree with your perception that CC licensing, where it is implemented as a "set-it-and-forget-it" option, is gaming any results since it is rarely, if ever, the default setting (people have to make that choice).

Which speaks to your last point... which is correct to some extent, and agreeable, I feel however that it IS a question of "people who know are using it" and in this case the "people who know it most and using it most" are the music makers and THAT to me IS indicative of something. (Something to do with the nature of that medium...)

Of course... if CC's datacollection techniques are skewed, well then... ;)

Bon ok ok, je me calme. :D


3- John Poisson

However I disagree with your perception that CC licensing, where it is implemented as a "set-it-and-forget-it" option, is gaming any results since it is rarely, if ever, the default setting (people have to make that choice).

I set my Flickr CC settings when they introduced that feature and I haven't touched it since. Am I explicitly thinking about re-use of my photos each time I post some nonsense to Flickr? Nope. Am I posting a lot more pictures to Flickr than I am unleashing music tracks to the commons? Hell yeah.

The results aren't gamed, they're just a single lonely decontextulaized data point.

Drop it like it's hot, Boris.


John,

I think there's a level of granularity which is missing in this discussion.

1. First it's still a lot harder to _create_ music than create photographs. It requests a lot more skills and more time to do one piece of music.

2. If we would like to really compare the results between photographs and musics, we would need to illustrate the ones who have a creation desires specifically in the photography world.

It would be good to be able to separate those who are taking a simple photograph of Aunt Josie (I have nothing against Josie name) blowing the candles on her birthday cake and the ones who are taking a picture of a moment of life of Josie.
The latter have an intention in taking the photograph and their desires of sharing or not the photograph in the future is something which is thought. It moves from a casual photograph to a desired creation (be it or not).

3. Images are not yet understood. Then people don't understand it as something reusable and modifiable. Dadaist are still not known. In the whole world, we don't learn how to interpret them, how to read them, how to produce them (and this depending on each culture). Music is keeping a level of abstraction which makes it more distant from our own physical existence, except a few persons I know (real musicians most of the time).