Xerxes Atlas Blog

I've been visiting lawyers. They've got their own take on our ideas. What's they're referring to is known as "CC+". Sounds like a programming language, but it's not.

When I spoke to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia last month he said that we should consider using the Attribution Share-a-like licence. We'd been thinking of using the Attribution Non-Commercial licence - but he argued that we would get the all the benefits of a groundswell of use by not implementing the Non-Commercial clause but the Share-a-like would be enough to stop the major players. From Elliot's blog:

Here in Australia, a staff member at the ABC, one of the national public broadcasters, informed me that it was unlikely that they would ever use Share Alike-licensed material in an ABC product because there is uncertainty what would need to be licensed on the same terms. As they pondered, “Would that segment have to be licensed? Or the whole show?” The potential scope of what must be licensed on the same terms (which allow remixing) makes the Share Alike licences less appealing to mainstream licensees.

In fact, this blog entry talks about a photographer who's photograph licenced under a Attribution licence was picked up by the movie 'Iron Man'. Although the movie didn't need to ask permission as long as the attributed the work to him,  they choose to maintain their risk-adverse clearances process when dealing with permissions to reuse content and wanted to pay him for his work.

Read the whole article here: http://popcult.cc/?p=191

We're going through the process of writing down our business plan. As part of the argument for doing things the way we're doing things, I've been researching other people that have already done something similar successfully. When I was talking to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia he sent me a link to a really good presentation on Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. The basic premise is:

Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$)

And you can do this even by giving away your stuff.

Bridget is challenged to use Xerxes Atlas as a PhD topic and Jade talks to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia - he suggests not using the non-commercial licence as we'll get what we want anyway.