Cory Doctrow’s Idea for Digital Licensing
May 15th, 2009 by Macguffin in UncategorizedCory Doctrow has a very interesting article up on Internet Evolution. In it, he puts out an idea he thinks could help resolve the issue of internet makers creating things that infringe on other people’s intellectual property, said IP holders then bringing onerous lawsuits to bear, etc. His idea is to do a hybrid Creative Commons license for your content.
The regular CC license essentially says that if you’re not doing so commercially, go ahead and remix and use our stuff as you see fit. Have a ball. If you want to make money, though, you need to come talk to us and we will work out a license.
The hybrid part of the equation is to change that last part to something like, if you want to make money, go for it. Pay us 20% of your reciepts each year. He calls it Do-It-Yourself Digital Licensing.
The upshot here is that you let people who really love your game go ahead and use your assets legally – and you give them a way to compensate you for it. The people that were going to rip you off, well – they were going to do that anyway. As a practical matter, you don’t bring lawyers into it unless people are ripping you off on a larger scale.
I’m oversimplifying this on a grand scale. Gianfranco over at GBGames also has much better post up with his thoughts. I recommend the read, and especially the original Doctrow article from above.
This is a VERY intriguing notion for me, and I think for many indie game companies that are trying to create interesting IPs. We’re going to look very hard at this for Heritage.
Tags: business, Game Development, heritage, indie
May 15th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the link! Yeah, this idea seems to obvious, considering we already had Creative Commons licenses available, and yet it seems brilliant because it essentially asks you to stop acting like we’re still living in era when you needed to protect EVERYTHING and could dictate to the masses how to consume what you produce. Everyone is a producer these days, and this Do-It-Yourself licensing streamlines and simplifies copyright for them.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:40 am
Love this idea. As GB said above, we no longer live in a time when producers and publishers can reasonably tell people to not remix your content. If they want to, they’ll likely go ahead and do so. Trying to plug that hole is a mostly futile effort. Instead, embrace the remixers (who most likely are your biggest fans) and allow them to use your content under some legal structure. A hybrid CC license is probably the easiest way to go for all parties.