Right to Copy?

I was in a meeting last night, discussing intellectual property, at which one of the participants suggested that copyright is ‘un-green’. “Greens do not do copyright” were the approximate words used. As a green, and a content producer and publisher (no matter that few read the words I write and publish), I could not disagree more. The Thursday Briefing is licensed under a Creative Commons ‘BY-NC-SA’ licence, which is just the way I like it. You see, I like to have control over my content. After all, why should I give up control to something that costs me time, money, and effort to produce? But equally, I want to share what I produce with others, and allow others to take the posts that I produce, or the photos I take, and make interesting things out of them.

Take the photo below of some amusing graffiti in Paris as an example. If copyright law did not exist, and that work were in the public domain, I would have no right to stop a company, for example Underground Carrots PLC* from using it in an advertisement, and no right to receive royalties from its usage. Because of Creative Commons, based on copyright, I can licence it for non-commercial use where it is attributed to me.

Copyright law is good, but it is far from perfect. Without it, this blog, my personal blog, my photos on Flickr, and anything else I’ve published online, would be in the public domain, free for anyone to take and do what they want with. Call me old-fashioned, but that is not an appealing prospect; if it were the case, I’d shut this blog tomorrow.

* Naturally a fictitious company.

The lovely font used in the fake advert is Public Gothic, from http://www.a2591.com/2009/10/type-for-you.html.