Saturday, April 16, 2005

Creative Kleptomania

Creative Kleptomania?
"I'm glad my article "Is Cheap Broadband Un-American?" is getting such prominent play. It was in the lead slot at SlashDot for most of yesterday (where it's received more than 700 comments and 10,000 readers), and was posted in its entirety on other sites -- citing fair use and other methods.

Fine. However, I wrote it for In These Times and posted it here on my blog.

It's important that more people become vocal about the issue of affordable broadband for all. But many of these sites carried my article in full without asking my permission; and now they're basking in the glow of tens of thousands of readers who apparently came to read the story. Meanwhile, the piece, as it was posted on this blog by its author, has received less than 200 visitors.

Don't take this wrong. I’m a sworn citizen of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons. But somehow I feel as though I’ve just been reamed.

3 comments:

Timothy Karr said...

Thanks Kimberly.

I'm happy to see this issue get attention and am pleased that my story is a part of this dynamic conversation. I encourage everyone to link to my story but would prefer that those links point to the original location and author of the story, and not to sites that reposted it in full without asking. If they had asked, I would have said yes as long as there's a prominent tip of the hat to MediaCitizen. That's all. Please feel free to use any or all of the story as you wish.

Tim

spyder said...

As one of the 200+ i can offer this view. Underlying the process of reading posts on different sites, is that if one particular piece is lifted and distributed and widely responded to, the chance that more of them will be subsequently respected. Once a certain familiarity develops with the author's style and content, readers begin to click through the trackback links, as well as to the source sites. It is only a matter of time for you Tim. You hard work is appreciated and will be experienced on this site with increasing frequency. And please do follow Jonathon's advice.

Anonymous said...

I don't understand: Are you saying you had a Creative Commons license on it, and people took advantage of that, but in retrospect this pisses you off? Or are you saying they didn't comply with the terms of the Creative Commons license?

If the former, well tough cookies. In the future just rely on normal copyright. If you're using CC just because you want to be a hepcat, you need to accept the consequences.

If the latter, the solution is simple: Sent a DMCA notification to Slashdot's ISP or the ISP of whoever is hosting the copy, as well as to Google. They'll take it down pronto. At that point it will only go back up if the posting party files a DMCA response. Although they may claim at first fair use, people tend to back off when they realize they need to make that claim in a sworn statement as specified in a federal statute, if their fair use claim is pretty flaky, as a full-text reprint is.