[sclug] World's first Open movie released

[John Barron]

On Saturday 03 June 2006 19:42, Taiyo Rawle wrote:
> Yeah, it's wicked stuff, if a little whacky and
> surreal...
>
> Lugradio did a little review of it in s3e16:
> http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/51
>
> Cheers!
> -Taiyo
>

Fantastic achievement, of course.

There's one thing I see which concerns me, to see something like this
produced as an Open movie, rather than a Copyleft movie. The selected
Creative Commons license does not include the "non-commercial" constraint
(Yay - good call) but also omits the "share-alike" constraint (Boo - poor
choice).

The problem is that is not that anyone can take the work, and redistribute
it or produce derivatives (commercially or otherwise), as that was the
intention, but that (subject to attribution, only) such a derivative work
could be subjected to the full force of today's copyright and/or Digital
Restrictions, and locked away from subsequent re-distribution, re-mixing,
and re-use.

This has happened with computer software, has it not, and
is the reason for inventing Copyleft - what would prevent it in this case,
should "Elephants Dream" become successful and popular enough for a
commercial organisation to do that to it?

I don't believe that is what the creators of "Elephants Dream" would like
to see, nor that it serves the interests of the wider community for that to
be possible.

Share-alike protects the original creator (and the rest of us!) from that,
with content like this, by ensuring that creators themselves and downstream
contributors will always retain the freedom to re-use and re-mix any
further downstream derivative works produced. 

So I always encourage the use of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 
licensing for content like this.