https://soundcloud.com/andrew-price/episode-35-interview-with
Andrew and Francesco talk about Gooseberry and about the Sintel/YouTube issue!
Andrew writes:
In this episode I chat with Francesco Siddi from the Blender Foundation about the Gooseberry donation drive and Blender Cloud.
Plus, after the interview I talk about the recent Sintel/Sony copyright debacle, the new Captain America movie, my stupid bicycle accident story and the April Fools video from last week :)
Link
5 Comments
The whole automated copyright claiming, to my knowledge, works by having people release audio- / video-samples into a pool which an algorithm checks videos against to figure out if copyright was infringed.
The issue is that there is no second pool for things in the creative commons. It would be fairly easy to fix this stuff. If the material in question is in the creative commons, the algorithm could just skip right over it.
It would be awesome of YouTube to just provide a couple of options to pools:
Flag things as "delete (copyright infringement), take ad revenue (copyright infringement), flag as distributable (creative commons)" and you'd be set.
In case of creative commons, the video could even be auto-tagged to include a tag "creator_name" as well as a link to the original or, perhaps, some website you can specify.
And perhaps there are some other contract models that could be handled in precisely this way.
Unfortunately, everyone has ideas as to how these things SHOULD be, but even if given the resources couldn't make a WORKING model. There is more to this than meets the eye, and that may well be negligence on the part of youtube. At least they moved to solve the problem reasonably quickly.
Now anyone who has an open source example of mistake-proof copyright protection, please show us (and youtube).
DRM is infamous for hurting paying customers and not at all stopping piracy. Game Maker Studio had their own misfire when DRM overwrote game art files with pirate symbols. The people most affected by this were paying customers who lost however many days of work through a DRM miss. no one wants to be pirated, but no one wants to sell a DRM buggy product, oh wait, they do.
I am often vocally on the other side of Andrew Price and his sometimes very unprofessional casual comments. One thing I will say though, he seems to value product quality over secured sales, which in my opinion is the whole point.
Sorry, but Sintel is *not* 100% creative commons. After it was made, the
musician backtracked on the original everything-is-open agreement and
declared that he'd prefer if people personally seek and ask his
permission to use the music in anything else. Until his stance on this
matter is revoked and we really are free to use the movie, and assets
without such ties, the movie cannot be called described as completely
"open" creative commons. It either is or it isn't. Blender Foundation
can't have it both ways.
Lance - you cannot make such statements without evidence, or you could just ask me to clarify the case. You have my email address!
Jan Morgenstern delivered and published the Sintel soundtrack in CC-BY to us. That makes the film (all our films) 100% CC-BY. You can use (portions of) the soundtrack freely as CC-BY.
Jan released the original score separately as CC-BY-NC-ND - a license which I don't like much, but which is quite understandable for composers to use. Also this is valid "Creative Commons".
http://www.sintel.org/news/complete-score-available-for-download/
The CC license also doesn't say anything about the sources (or requirement of availability of sources). That is what our Blender project is unique in. And yes, we'd love to do a full open sound/music project once. But who's going to pay the bills? Jan was one of our biggest sponsors, delivering us world class music and services for an extreme humble pay. That helped us (Blender, open source) tremendously!
Hi Ton, thanks for your input.
Maybe I'm mixing technical CC with Open Source, although I like to use Blender (and the Open Movie projects) as a powerful example of what Open licensing can be so certainly I'd like to correct my misunderstandings. My "evidence" is memory, though I think it can be found here: http://www.sintel.org/news/complete-score-available-for-download/ where Jan says,
"Those CC licenses apply to ...[snip]... not the “abstract” song itself... [snip] ...you’d still need to acquire “traditional” performance/publishing rights in order to record and publish your own version... [snip] ...and I’ll gladly give permission to anyone who asks me for it. Commercial usage is a different matter, but I’m generally also quite cooperative there... [snip] ...just ask me.
...[snip]... I’m trying to find a reasonable middle ground between keeping things in the spirit of an open movie, while still accounting for the fact that I’m doing this for a living. I can’t do a lot about the fact that some people think I’m leaning too far towards the latter, but please don’t let this turn into a licensing discussion."
...and here I go turning it into a licensing discussion (lol).
From this, my understanding is that if I wanted to cut a segment from Jan's Sintel theme song and use it as backing for a career-seeking animation reel, perhaps looping a segment or adding fade-in / fade-out, then, unless gaining explicit permission to do so, I would be violating two parts of the conditions; the editing could be seen as a "derivative" and the end-use (job applications) would be deemed as commercial. I'm probably being an extremist here, though I studied animation in a Design School where there was a lot of pressure to obtain backing track / asset permission for student reels; so much so that I had to completely change the original music of mine because I couldn't reach the musician I wanted fast enough (paper war with his front desk).
I know Jan says "just ask" and that he is very generous in giving permissions. Maybe I should just do that. Nevertheless, the act of asking does imply (to my understanding) that the work isn't fully "open" in the Stallman sense. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying "Open" versus "CC".
Thanks also for the invite to send you an email; I do have some other questions about similar things which I think you could clarify, so if you have the time to answer it would be very helpful to me, and I'll put something together.