Commoner of the week: Roy Blumenthal
Our cc-er of the week is Roy Blumenthal - ‘artist, filmmaker, radio personality, performance poet, trouble-shooter, and ex-advertising copywriter’. Roy lives in Johannesburg and has a wonderful blog called ‘Coffeeshop Shmuck’ consisting of ‘totally subjective coffee-shop and restaurant reviews’ - a little more unusual (you’ll find great gossip on Roy’s latest hot dates) than what you’ll find in the M&G, that’s for sure!
Roy is a big fan of Creative Commons and has licensed everything on his site under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 licence. As South Africa’s first artist using Creative Commons to licence his printed works, Blementhal is getting people talking about copyright and the Internet - if you’ve ever been involved in the art industry, you’ll know how shocking it is for an artist to say: go ahead, copy it, share it - it’s what I want.
Below is an extract from a letter Blumenthal wrote during a pretty heated discussion about copyright in a global screenwriters’ forum. It gives you a bit of insight into a guy who is both creative and highly strategic in his approach to copyright.
‘The reason I opted to go for a Creative Commons licence is that I WANT people to spread my ideas around. I WANT people to use my thinking in a way that opens the world out a little bit. (Might be vain, of course, and my content might really NOT be world-changing, but to SOME, it might be, and I want them to be able to get those things circulating.) I’ve been very frustrated with conventional copyright law. It’s very much a blanket ownership statement, with no grey areas CONTROLLED BY THE OWNER OF THE COPYRIGHT. Those words are all-caps, cos they’re the frustration. I’M the owner of my stuff. I want to control how I disseminate it.
Finally, here’s a way of doing that.
If only Drudge [a blogger who one of the forum members had quoted, causing a ruckus amongst members as to the legality of the quote] had a Creative Commons licence on his site. Or at least some kind of explicit declaration of his intent for people to spread his views. I went to his site, and find that he’s a devout blogger, and he has three different kinds of syndication feeds. (Atom, RSS 1 and RSS 2.)
This indicates that he IS indeed keen for his stuff to be spread non-commercially.
Syndication feeds are things used by people or organisations supplying “news” or opinion or real news to give their content away for consumption by end users. But they’re generally “giving” in the sense of “allowing people to read and spread their content”. They’re not GIVING it away for commercial use.
In other words, if one of us were to write a movie based on a Roy Blumenthal (that’s me) blog, or a Drudge blog, lawyers will immediately pull their gloves on and scream about money.
But heck… spread my words to as many people as you want. Copy the whole blog, for that matter, and send it to your favourite congressperson. As long as, when someone makes bucks out it, I do too.’