AWA License draft 1

[Louigi Verona]

Guys!
I have finished work on the first draft of the AWA License.

AWA License is an Anonymous Works of Art License, behind which stands a particular authorship philosophy. The article exploring that will soon be posted at the slow club website, if you are curious about the main idea, I briefly explained at the bottom of this post and supplied a link to a forum post I made a long time ago.

For the moment, I want anyone interested to check out the text of the license, see if all's clear and/or you have any suggestions and comments.

The text of the license is here: http://www.slowclub.org/?page=awa

Later there will be an introductory text before a more official and detailed license text explaining what it does in simple English.
I will explain here: releasing under the AWA License means the author does not put his name or any other identification on the work itself - he can freely speak about his authorship, but the work itself should only mention it is released under the AWA License and have no author listings.
Anyone is free to use and distribute the work with no restrictions but one: the work itself or derivative work should be distributed under the same license. (there is some distinction though between a derivative work and the usage of a small part, like sampling - the most complex part of the license)


For the philosophy,

1. here is the link to the original article, which I wrote initially at TiS. The article is very basic and the reasoning there is not complete, like some highlighted points are not the ones I would highlight today, after having carefully thought it over and organized all the points in a better way. However, the basic direction I would think is clear.

http://www.traxinspace.com/discussions/general/view/1255?w=all

2. for a short description, the philosophy behind AWA tries to eliminate or rather depreciate the role of authorship in art, make it irrelevant who wrote what and instead focus on the works themselves, at the same time leaving one of the practical authorship applications intact, that is by allowing the author to indicate his authorship by speaking about it or even writing about it and thus connect himself with his work which will allow people to acknowledge his talents and encourage the person to use them for the benefit of the society. For example, if you know that a person can paint well, you will more likely ask him to do so if you need his talents. But the works themselves being freely distributed and with no names very quickly loose the connection with the author for most people who would get them.

This is very basic. The authorship philosophy is very well developed and as soon as I finish the article on it and polish it, I will post a link to it here.

[residentgrey]

Good gravy good stuff! I'll take another look when it's not 3am.  :lol:

[LPChip]

Posted: 17 Apr 2009 08:01 am

... when it's not 3am.  :lol:

Right.... :lol:

[bvanoudtshoorn]

That's a very post-modern stance to take, LV. Personally, I don't think that I would use the license, but I do think it will have a place.  Perhaps you should contact CC and chat with them about referencing it.

[Louigi Verona]

Already did. They liked the idea, but recommended I just make a separate license. After all, the philosophy is very different - that is, it takes a very similar stance in general with the idea of almost no restrictions in art, but it sort of looks at a different side.

I did have a conversation with one person about the AWA License and he understood it from a very economical standpoint, which makes the whole idea absurd and even stupid. Possibly because I haven't yet found clear few words to explain the idea. Maybe it is not the kind of idea you can explain in few words.

[Sam_Zen]

Having a quick look, this looks like another nice approach to a quite complicated matter.
At least there's a serious consideration about the consequences of digital use of material.

These matters are quite hard to explain in a few words.
Especially because lots of coming artists still expect to get money when their work is on the radio, while sitting on their ace.

[Louigi Verona]

I wonder if you guys can help me with your opinions on using someone else's art in one's art. Lately in non-Internet discussions I have stumbled upon opinions that using anyone's material no matter how creatively done is lame - like, if one is that creative, why doesn't he write his own material? Like, it is easier to not do anything and just take well written stuff and perform it or sample it.

I have a certain explanation of why things like sampling are important, but I want to hear what other people think. Please, be as detailed as you want.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

I think, LV, that there's basically a line somewhere. Quite where that line is, I can't say exactly -- in fact, I don't think anyone could. On the one side of the line is what I would term "legitimate" use of other people's material; on the other side, "illegitimate".

Legitimate use basically suggests that the work is predominantly your own. Any use of other people's material is simply to accomplish your goals. I guess you could make an analogy with code reuse in programming: you don't need to write every single piece of code you use yourself, but it's still your responsibility to pull everything together so that it fulfils your vision.

Illegitimate use, to me, is when someone else's work is all that there is in your own work. For example, if I take the melody from "Final Countdown" and craft a track around that, I am illegitimately using it, unless I have permission. This is, of course, a very grey area, and questions like "how much can I use?", "what can I use?" and so on don't have very clear answers.

My stance has been that if I, as the composer (to move into music more concretely) can recognise in my own music someone else's work, and that wasn't my intention, I either need to change it or not release it. If, however, someone listens to a piece I've released, and informs me that my melody is very similar to one composed by a Mongolian flautist from 1932 (or, say, some contemporary recording artist), I can say "Oh gee, that's interesting! I've never heard that track before!" -- to my mind, that's not illegitimate use.

[Sam_Zen]

This is getting interesting. Maybe this is about 'possession cq property'. When is a sound, a melody, a structure, to be considered 'home-made', one's own ?

In the classical, acoustic world, things are quite one-dimensional. But when dealing with electronic instruments, things are more complicated.
One can record in some memory format, and reproduce. One can pre-program the sound of an instrument and push a key.
Electronics can be 'autophonic', meaning they are able, after a trigger, to produce several sounds in time without further effort.

The number zero license of course, when somebody is using material made by somebody else, shows civilised behaviour by mentioning the source.
At the same time, with electronics, there's a difference between just using a copied structure, or using it as raw material to make a new construction.

At some point, after a lot of work, one could judge the result as one's own making, while, maybe, mentioning the author of the source.
The major institutions gathering money from copyright made a big fuzz about sampling. They couldn't get a clear legislation about it.
(Of course they didn't. Asking only advice from layers and accountants, not from technical experts..)

Technically seen there's no difference between recording the first two seconds, or the whole song of 'Here comes the Sun'.
Both can be considered a sample. A piece of recorded sound.
Of course just using a klone of such sample would bring copyright-hunters into excitement, if one claims it to be one's own work.

But what, if I patiently checked the whole track to find a certain sound of the bassguitar to use as a sample, with a lot of work to suppress the sounds of the other instruments ?
In courts there has been used the argument of : when is a source still recognized as the original ?
This is, if electronics are involved, a very vague area.

What, if I use a Ring Modulator with 'Here comes the Sun' on input A, and the reversed 'Here comes the Sun' on input B ?

Anyway, I think that licensing is about giving 'permissions', so a positive drive, instead of, by the money institutions, 'forbidding' things.

[Louigi Verona]

barry: Want to make more clear a few points, expand them a bit.

1a. does it mean that the use of certain material becomes legitimate if someone (the author) says it is legitimate?

1b. do you think there is a way to define legitimate by itself, without asking opinion of someone else? (for instance, killing another human being is bad because each one of us has a certain moral guide light, so we have a reference inside ourselves. can such a reference be found for use of art?)

2. in your Mongolian flautist example you say that if you did not intentionally use someone else's work, it is legitimate to you. Does it have to be as legitimate to everyone else? Noone can tell whether you knew or not.

3. Your view seems to place the value of original material over modified material. Why?

sam:

1. Same as what I asked Barry - why should something be necessarily one's own? To whom is it important and why?

2a. Licensing is about giving permissions in the current state of law. Do you think that the author has a naturally given power to decide how people work with his material?

2b. If the answer to the previous question would be 'yes' - how to deal with the situation when you do not know who the author of the sample is?

Comment on your post:
As a note about the problem of sampling, I would say that the law here made a simple decision which is this: if you can't solve a problem and do not know the correct answer, criminalize it. Which is what was done. The oversimplified and at times erroneous analogy between material objects and ideas in political campaigns on the subject shows that little thought was done in that direction.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

1a. Yep, pretty much. That's what licenses are all about.
1b. I don't think so. You see, art and music are very sophisticated social constructs, whereas life and death are very basic ideas (in the sense of being at the base, not simple).

2. Most of the time, I'd say that what matters most is my own perception -- I'm not very post-modern, so the audience don't matter too much to me in this regard. Essentially, this is something that has happened lots and lots of times throughout history: people working in the same area achieve the same thing or something similar independently. Normally, the person who "got there first" gets the accolades, but the other people don't get abused for copyright violation, theft, or whatever.

3. I don't think it does -- at least, that wasn't my intention. What my view does, I think, indicate, is that the situation in regard to original material is much simpler than that in regard to modified material.

[Louigi Verona]

barry

Okie, thanks for the answers, very useful to me.


Want to poke one more question a bit deeper.

art and music are very sophisticated social constructs

Do you think that if the social element is taken out of art and music, the matter would be less complicated?

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Well, no. I think maybe I didn't make myself clear...

Art and music are very high-level aspects of humanity. I don't believe that music, or at least the ownership of music, is as intrinsic to humans as is the ownership of life, say. Just as we have constructed ways and means of 'owning' land, goods, ideas, and software, we have had to construct ways of 'owning' music. Now, just as the patent office had to be created to allow people to lay ownership to ideas, music requires society to formulate some new way of allowing people to claim ownership of music.

To be honest, that's what you're doing here, and that's what CC and so on are trying to do. (They're also trying to do it with other things as well, but I'll focus on music, because that's probably what's of most interest to people here.)

Now, as I understand it, your license would basically make music 'public domain'. To make an analogy, music is land. Most land is owned; most music is copyright and isn't freely available for use or whatever. Some land, however, is made free for public use, like parks or plazas or whatever, and that's what your license is getting at, I think. If this is what you mean, then I think that I'm coming to appreciate your license's place more. Clearly, just as it would be untenable (no pun intended) for a city to be all parks, it wouldn't work for all music to be released under your license. Similarly, a city may be made more public-friendly by having a few parks in it.

Now parks are generally anonymous: their designer doesn't stick his name on them; this is, I suppose, a parallel with your license. Now let's say that music isn't like a park, but like the benches in the park -- bear with me. Here in Australia, and I assume in most of the developed world, people will often donate benches etc. to parks, engraved with a name or something. [Often, they donate a bench when someone who particularly loved that park dies or whatever.] They are claiming ownership of the bench, but they are releasing it for public use. In other words, they're saying "This is what I/this guy did -- feel free to use it!" This, I think, is more like the CC licenses, and this is (roughly) how I release my music. Just as you wouldn't want someone carving their own name on the bench in place of the original name, I don't want someone claiming my music. Nor do I want people charging people for using the bench, or moving it around.

I hope that that whole spiel made sense.

[Louigi Verona]

barry: got your point, very well explained.

To clear the AWA License - it does not put the music into the public domain because it has the "copyleft" clause - "the modified version of the work should be released under the same license and thus should not exhibit the name of the author who modified it".
So I would say it creates an island of art with no owners attached - to try the park analogy, if you want to donate a bench, it should be anonymously. But it is not about economics, it is about experiencing a feeling of gifting something instead of selling.

But I do not want to go too far away from exploring our discussion, I'll have time to explain the reasons behind AWA License later.

Let me expand another point of our reasoning.

Just as we have constructed ways and means of 'owning' land, goods, ideas, and software, we have had to construct ways of 'owning' music.

Why did we have to do it in the realm of ideas? What are the benefits and downsides of having owners in the realm of ideas?

[Sam_Zen]

Well, I'm glad the discussion evolves into the 'ownership' of sound. So the demanding of any rights about it.

In fact I'm going to like the AWA concept. First I was worried about the 'anonymus' idea, but this worry is vanishing..

I see an analogy with the software open source concept here.

One donates to the community, because thanks to the community, it's possible to share a contribution.

And the feedback proves that 1 plus 1 can be a bit more than 2. So the community benefits.