No
Rights Reserved
"The internet, in its current form,
moves everything it touches toward the public domain."
Revolution is Not an AOL Keyword
was published using a public domain, no rights reserved
license, a category to the side of the Creative Commons licensing choices which otherwise make
various copyright levels available and include attribution as a minimum
requirement for use. The Creative Commons has not seen the No Rights Reserved
designation adopted much, compared to the 400k or so discrete webpages which
have posted their other licenses since the December 16, 2002 launch. People seem more
interested in Some Rights Reserved, although there are a couple of examples
like Natalie Merchant, who is recording public domain music, and
Oprah Winfrey who has started a public domain book club. And then there is Sal Randolf's "Free
Words" project, where her books are placed in bookstores and
labeled free, but the words too are free, as they are in
the public domain. Derek Slater has also written about his dilemma with
public domain blog publishing.
Putting Revolution into the public domain, people linked, reprinted, commented and reposted, rewrote, surmised and objected. They even wiki-ed.
The desire to protect something, not through copyright
or for profit, but simply to keep the integrity of a work intact is strong.
Fundamentally, people want to connect to each other through an understanding of
meaning. And yet it is nearly impossible to do perfectly as a direct, fixed conduit from creator to audience.
When something is free on the Internet, the integrity
of the original remains, as much as anything can be considered
really original. But as it is copied and changed, linked to and sampled, there is a
heightened understanding, as well as a complete loss, of any attribution,
depending on the republishing. Sampling, reuse and innovation
prompt questions of possession and control, issues
that test the creator’s ego, the need to be known and connected to a work, to
say where and how that work is used. I believe audiences understand innately riffs
and reuses, and take meaning without always needing tacit clues for
understanding. Interestingly, even though Revolution is available for the taking, many of
the blogs and links to the work have attributed,
or linked back to the bIPlog in some way. Better still,
many more did not.
Text on paper, in the context of a deconstruction, can be
analyzed to get at what’s implied underneath.
Text embedded with links presents an explicit layer of the creator’s intentions
and expression underneath, creating a linking universe across and between blogs and the web. Linking was part of the original Revolution, but not every
reprint contained the links. The essence of the piece changed with each
sampling, as people rearranged the meaning, posted different sections, with or
without links, and with or without attribution. In fact, it appears that as it
was copied without attribution, it
spread further.
If you print out a copy of Gil Scott-Heron’s Television and the HTML coded copy, with all the links
explicitly on the page, of Revolution, you would have a hard
time finding the similarity in exact expression. Though as a whole it is an
elaboration, continuation, imitation, even derivative of the original. This
description is all about the elements a judge would consider in a fair use analysis in case of
dispute, which would consider the idea/expression dichotomy as a backdrop and
the four elements of fair use analysis (which is sometimes literally done by
placing the works side by side for comparison in terms of same number of words,
etc.).
It has occurred to me that creators concerned with copyright could benefit from the
process of making something they could profit from, but instead put into the public domain, placed digitally on the Internet to go wherever it will, in
whatever format with whatever parts audiences and republishers find compelling
as they respond to it. Dropping barriers that keep the
audience from deciding for themselves how to understand and connect to content
would seem to be the ultimate in encouraging innovation and reuse in the public domain (pdf).
Mary
Hodder
April
10, 2003