We went the the picture the other day, my True Love and I, and were treated to five minutes of stern lecturing about the evils of pirates and how if we were caught videoing the screen we would be banned from the cinema for ever and fined and fined and fined until there was nothing left to fine. You thief. You Pirate. How dare you! Now buy a Cornetto and enjoy the film.
It struck me that the people who were showing the film, or at least the industry behind it, really hated us. They didn't want us there, they just wanted our money but we'd better not remember the film too well or they'd be round with the boys.
This train of thought ended, as these things often do, with a trip to the internets. There are, of course, people out there who have had these thoughts already and have cut through to the root of the issues in clear and incisive ways.
A visit to amazon and a couple of book later and I'm drinking the creative commons kool-aid.
Okay – so these are going to be baby steps. I've made a start with the Reindeer model. I released the model under a creative commons licence rather than the usual copyright notice. Creative commons lets the author decide what rights they are going to give. Its a kind of mix and match, pick out the bits you want and make your own license scheme. For the reindeer-mono I have applied Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike licence.
Attribution- if you send it to someone else, please leave my name on it. Non-commercial – you can't sell it. Share-alike – you are free to make changes to the file (so long as you leave the attribution in) but the cc licence must remain the same.
I have more thinking to do about this, for example, I'm not sure if I should apply this licence to everything I do, but I reckon that this is taking steps in the right direction. Unlike the film industry and the music industry, I love you!
Further reading: