DIY Librarian

When big corporations produce content (or more likely, package and market content), that content is clearly under copyright and must be protected by heavy-handed measures from “pirates”.

But when the public, perhaps embracing marketing for digital cameras and web photo services that tells them to unleash their creativity, decides to produce and disseminate their own content, corporations turn around and snap up that content. To use in ad campaigns selling the “real” and “genuine”, no less.

That’s what is happening, according to an article in the Washington Post:

Under the banner of “intellectual property,” record labels warn you not to bootleg their songs. Hollywood studios warn you not to download their movies. Intellectual property has lately seemed the concern of corporations trying to protect the artist from the grabby public.

But in an increasingly user-generated world where the public is the artist, sometimes it’s the big boys who get grabby. And the questions that arise are about ownership, but they are also about fairness, and changing culture, and ultimately, the search for authenticity.

I just hope that these stories don’t scare people away from Creative Commons licenses. While some of the content used without permission was posted with a CC license, other content was not and thus “all rights reserved” by default. The corporations ignored both CC licenses and traditional copyright.

A CC license doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights to your content. It means you have decided to allow certain uses, as defined in the license. For example, DIY Librarian uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. You are welcome to republish my content as long as I get credit, you don’t alter it, and you’re not making money off of it. It’s win-win: you get to use my content, I get recognition and a wider audience. You want to use something I made in an ad campaign, you need to talk to me. I want to make sure anything I create is used appropriately and that I am fairly compensated, and I have the right to refuse other uses.

Via the Creative Commons blog, free symbols for use in “airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events”, from a collaboration between AIGA and the US Department of Transportation. Some of these could probably be used in library signage, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a collection like this for libraries? (If such a thing exists, please let me know!)

From Mary Minow’s interview with David Dodd, librarian and author of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics:

This is my third book, and each has carried with it a greater or lesser degree of do-it-yourselfness. … You don’t just sign a contract, turn over a manuscript, and sit back and wait for the book to appear.

That actually makes the process sound more appealing to me, except for the copyright permissions, which do not sound like fun.

[via librarian.net]