Share and Protect
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| A creative entrepeneur: Madonna at the premiere of I Am Because We Are in 2008 (photo from Wikipedia) |
As a creative entrepreneur you are faced with some conflicting challenges if you publish material on the Internet:
- You want to distribute your work to as many people as possible in order to sell, share or give it away.
- If you produce a “hit” in the market you most likely want to earn money from it.
- At the same time you don’t want other people to earn money from your work, unless you get a fair share of the income.
Neither Copyright nor ‘free use’ will cover your needs in these respects. How can you share artistic products on the Internet and still have control on how it is used by others?
The answer is CC - Creative Commons.
CC is a supplement to Copyright and internationally accepted as a legal way to share and protect multimedia content.
The video “Wanna work together” shows how CC works for people who want to collaborate on the Internet.
Here on the Incubiz website we require that all users of the Incubiz Upload service must accept a Creative Commons license for any material they upload. This will assure effective distribution over Internet without the risk for being sued for violation of legal rights.
Intellectual Property Rights – Read more!
- There is a “war” going on
- What is IPR
- Purpose of IPR
- Why use Creative Commons - CC
- Discussion about IPR
Find your IPR expert here!
Click on your flag to contact your own national experts on how to protect artistic and intellectual production. Ask them about Creative Commons.
http://www.buildingipvalue.com -
Intellectual Property Rights UK
Forbrukerrådet - Contact: Thomas Nordtvedt
Patent- och Registreringsverket
http://www.mfa.fo/ - Faroe Island Ministry of Foreign Affairs
There is a “war” going on
Production and distribution of digital content on the Internet has created a serious conflict of interest between the big players in the content industry and millions of users. What can we download for free, and what should be paid for? Well known cases are the Bit Torrent protocol and sites like Pirate Bay, which has lead to a high level of conflict between owners/producers on one side and users/consumers on the other side.
So far, the people behind Pirate Bay have been sentenced to close down the site and pay a large amount of money. A new and “legal” Pirate Bay is planned, and Spotify has entered the scene as a legal and effective distribution site. However, the war is not over! Experience shows that it is very difficult to stop new technology-based services when people find it convenient to use them, and when one service is stopped, a new and enhanced service will show up after a short time.
The lesson learned from the on-going “war” is that it is of vital importance for everyone in the creative business to take care of their rights. Our advice is to have a proactive approach to the challenges and look for new possibilities. However, the choice is yours, whether you go for the “old” way with Copyright or the “new” way with CC.
What is IPR?
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| Star Wars is protected by the traditional Copyright: TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd.2009 |
Intellectual property rights, IPR, is a concept for dealing with exclusive rights for creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial creations.
Artistic rights are traditionally covered by copyright laws, which protect creative works, such as books, movies, music, paintings, photographs, and software, and gives the copyright holder exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of such works for a certain period of time.
Industrial rights is collectively known as "industrial properties", as they are typically created and used for industrial or commercial purposes, i.e. patents and trademarks. This kind of IPR is not relevant for multimedia content. Note that the term intellectual property denotes the specific legal rights described above, and not the intellectual work itself.
Purpose of IPR
The purpose of IPR is to give creators exclusive rights to their works, thereby providing an incentive for developing and sharing information and creative works rather than keep it secret.
By doing so, the creators – or the owner of these rights - can also profit economically on other persons use of these works. 
Even if the history behind copyright and protection can be traced back a couple of centuries, the term “intellectual property” was defined in 1967 when World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO was established. The term did not enter popular usage before 1980.
Why use Creative Commons
The Creative Commons licenses enable a copyright holder to grant some or all of her/his rights to the public, and still retain control over the work when used in commercial settings.
The intention is to avoid the problems that Copyright laws create for sharing information, and still make it possible for a creator to earn money from the intellectual and artistic work. In many respects CC is a parallel to the Open Source movement in software development.
You will find national web pages for Creative Commons in 
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Scotland, UK (England & Wales).
In Ireland, the work with accepting CC as licence is still in progress.
Read more about the CC licenses on your national web page.
Incubiz recommends CC
For entrepreneurs who are starting up a creative business, we strongly recommend using CC licences on their work, and to use Internet as the preferred distribution channel. In spite of risks and weaknesses, we advocate that CC gives the best combination of effective promotion, broad distribution and sharing of artistic products, and still protecting the creator’s rights to get paid for commercial use of their works.
Incubiz offers you an UPLOAD service where you can display and share your creative productions with the Internet audience. To use the Incubiz UPLOAD, you have to accept Creative Commons as the licence system for your work, and of course, you have to guarantee that you have the rights to publish the material.
Creative Commons may not be the final solution in the future. However, at the moment, CC is the best way to solve the conflicting interests of distribution, protection and sharing.
Discussions about IPR
Critics of intellectual property rights, characterize it as intellectual protectionism or intellectual monopoly and that IPR oppose the possibilities for sharing of information and intellectual works. They argue that free access to intellectual work is a prerequisite for creative innovations, and that both the creators and the public interest are harmed by the Copyright protectionism. Since most intellectual work nowadays is distributed over Internet, such protection is virtually impossible to control and enforce. The critics say that stricter laws and regulations will also imply more civil monitoring and may lead to a society that was described by George Orwell in the novel “1984”.
On the other hand, how can creative people make a daily living of their creative work if there is a completely free flow of digital content on the Internet? The defenders of traditional IPR claims that strong protection of information is a way of encouraging creativity and innovation by making it possible for people to make a living of their creativity. In the multimedia sector the industry strongly supports Copyright and have tried to develop new protection mechanisms such as Digital Rights Management - DRM that hinder people to make full use of new technologies.
The advocates for strong protection have been publishing houses, record companies and the film industry, but also many creative entrepreneurs support Copyright. They see it as the only way to protect their intellectual property. The question is whether they are trying to solve challenges in modern society with old-fashioned (and even unwanted) methods. However; there is a third alternative. While some of the IPR critics want everything to flow complete freely, others also recognize that creative artist should be paid when commercial interests make use of their work. This has lead to the construction of a new and more flexible kind of IPR protection: Creative Commons (CC).
While Copyright says: “All rights reserved”, Creative Commons says : “Some rights reserved”. The video “Wanna work together” shows how CC works.
