We can’t do CC-BY-SA because we’d have to use the same license, which would allow others to use the audio we’ve created outside of the Castify service.
We can’t do CC-BY-SA because we’d have to use the same license, which would allow others to use the audio we’ve created outside of the Castify service.
That’s an excuse. You can use the license. You just don’t want to do so. As you are making money out of the creative work of other people, why exactly shouldn’t you get away with not allowing others to reuse your content?
I guess I should have inserted in there that “We can’t run a business and do CC-BY-SA”. Of course we could use that license but then everyone would just share the recordings for free.
We are not trying to be greedy we just want to build a viable business that provides a valuable service. If you see a clever way to do that and still use the CC-BY-SA license then please let us know. We are still new and are willing to consider different business models.
Experiment proposal: Use CC-BY-SA for some recordings, and other licences for other recordings. A year later, measure how many copies of which recordings are available on internet. (I don’t recommend it seriously, but I would actually like to see the results.)
Hypothetically, would it be too big problem for you to use different licenses for audios of different articles, based on how the article author feels about this topic? Yes, your competitors could legally take some of your audios, but not all of them… so their satisfied customers would then come to you for the rest. Depending on numbers, the gains could outweigh the losses.
This is “crowdsourcing” in the pejorative sense: a cloud of “suckers”, all arrows pointing to “you” in the middle.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
You really, really can’t make a business except by proprietising contributions to a commons? The word for that is “parasite”. You really can’t?
Edit: The image I was thinking of, originally by Evan Prodromou (founder of WikiTravel) (here under CC-by 2.5 Canada):
The post the image is from is well worth reading, as are its comments, if you have a business plan that involves others doing the content creation unpaid.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
While I’m in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, “no benefit” isn’t exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they’re taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That’s work that benefits me.
That I wouldn’t approve of, but the possibility that some people misuse your work is the risk you take when setting it free. Besides, I’m pretty sure that they would be the ones who’d take the hit from that, once I had made clear that I had nothing to do with it and my work continued to be available for all.
It’d be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.
This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn’t hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no ‘ick’ reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they’re entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Hmm … Castify doesn’t have any other content (and thus, no subscribers) yet. They’re literally brand new; the castify.co domain was registered last month. They don’t have an audience yet to which to expose or promote LW.
For me, this whole exercise pattern-matches much closer to “a tech startup promoting itself in a known technophilic community” than to “an effort seriously designed to maximize accessibility and promotion of the content” or a crowdsourcing ripoff of the sort David Gerard is describing. (The Wikitravel case is pretty icky, but it doesn’t resemble this case much at all.)
Not that an act can’t be both a promotion and an accessibility effort; and it’s pretty low-risk for LW, but on the other hand —
— how much do you usually charge for endorsements?
I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Ever? That’s pretty strong. Even conditioned on the existence of audiobooks of HPMOR — which cannot be commercially done?
The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven’t done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven’t done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don’t want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what’s in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.
What’s offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we’d like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.
That was why we created this discussion in the first place.
Can we be less rude to people that aren’t used to our community’s discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn’t going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.
The problem is that the arrangement posited is in fact odious, and that that aspect is important. If you have a word of equal accuracy that concisely communicates the problematic nature of the posited arrangement, I’m all ears.
In this case, the point would be just as strong with no word there instead. “Odious” is also a good word, come to think of it—not “you are odious” but “the arrangement is odious, because you seek to make money by other people’s uncompensated labor,” assume that’s in fact the business model.
It is trivially true that people may gain from their work being published, even in the absence of remuneration from the publisher. For example, it may contain product placement they are being paid for, it may gain fans they can later sell products to, or it may spread ideas they wish to see popularized. Indeed, in the absence of these “parasites”, many of these would willingly pay for their work to be published, and indeed some do.
In this case, the articles in question were not made to provide this site with ad revenue or because they were commissioned by some wealthy individual, they were made to be read, and to inform others of their contents regarding rationality. Anything that allows more people to access this material aids that goal, and as such this deal is mutually beneficial to both parties. Of course, it would be nice if someone was willing to pay, but frankly none of us are going to pay (or donate our time) to produce such material, and we are fortunate that there is someone who expects sufficient benefit from this.
I guess I should have inserted in there that “We can’t RUN A BUSINESS AND do CC-BY-SA”. Of course we could use that license but then everyone would just share the recordings for free.
Who do you mean when you say everyone? Do you think that billions of people are going to share those recordings for free? Even more perplexing. If you think that they do, having a subset of your collection be shared by billions would probably have a very good return on the investment because it promotes your website and not all the products of your website have to be CC-BY-SA.
For most commerical successful infoproducts it’s possible to download them for free on some file sharing platform. People pay for those products usually because they think it’s fair to pay the creator of the product in return for the value that they created.
Most of that time file sharing is illegal but websites like Zenhabits show that successful businesses who give up on all copyright protection for their work do exist.
Very true. It’s hard to know how everyone will use the files once they get them onto the computer. What would happen if we released all copyright protection like Zenhabits? I have no idea. It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how it would play out in reality. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but we do have Eliezer’s large essay “The Simple Truth” available for free so people can try out the service.
LessWrong is a unique situation for us. Most of the other blogs we will be partnering with are written by a sole blogger who will want us to use some form of copyright protection. This is why we’ve asked for opinions on the topic here to see what everyone would like to do.
I personally think that an opt-out or opt-in system seems the most fair as it gives the individual the option.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but we do have Eliezer’s large essay “The Simple Truth” available for free so people can try out the service.
There are two different kinds of freedom. People can download “The Simple Truth” from you without paying anything. They however are not free to remix it and create derivative works based on it.
Most of the other blogs we will be partnering with are written by a sole blogger who will want us to use some form of copyright protection.
On your end I don’t see a need to license every recording the same way. Specifically it wouldn’t cost much to make an experiement.
Two channels with similar LessWrong content. At the start ask every author for permission.
One channel gets a closed license the other gets CC-BY-SA. Both get the same price. It would be interesting to know the practical effects. Does the closed license channel sell better?
How widely will the CC-BY-SA content get distributed?
What’s the business model, you bear the costs of recording audio and take a share (or all) of the profits, or the writer (LW in this case) bears the costs and you split the profits? Most people seem fine with CC-BY, you could tweak the split or the fee for the odd person that wants CC-BY-SA until it’s profitable again (or eat part of the cost to keep a client happy, if LW brings in enough business otherwise.
We can’t do CC-BY-SA because we’d have to use the same license, which would allow others to use the audio we’ve created outside of the Castify service.
That’s an excuse. You can use the license. You just don’t want to do so. As you are making money out of the creative work of other people, why exactly shouldn’t you get away with not allowing others to reuse your content?
I guess I should have inserted in there that “We can’t run a business and do CC-BY-SA”. Of course we could use that license but then everyone would just share the recordings for free.
We are not trying to be greedy we just want to build a viable business that provides a valuable service. If you see a clever way to do that and still use the CC-BY-SA license then please let us know. We are still new and are willing to consider different business models.
Experiment proposal: Use CC-BY-SA for some recordings, and other licences for other recordings. A year later, measure how many copies of which recordings are available on internet. (I don’t recommend it seriously, but I would actually like to see the results.)
Hypothetically, would it be too big problem for you to use different licenses for audios of different articles, based on how the article author feels about this topic? Yes, your competitors could legally take some of your audios, but not all of them… so their satisfied customers would then come to you for the rest. Depending on numbers, the gains could outweigh the losses.
Emphasis is *asterisks*, not CAPS LOCK.
FYI.
It’s 2012.
This argument has happened over and over again for the past 20+ years.
We all know how it turns out.
If you want to set the terms, you pay the creators.
Actually, whatever license you use, your content will be copied around.
If you use a proprietary license after taking CC-BY core content, copying your content will be less legal and less immoral.
This is “crowdsourcing” in the pejorative sense: a cloud of “suckers”, all arrows pointing to “you” in the middle.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others’ work, for no benefit to them.
You really, really can’t make a business except by proprietising contributions to a commons? The word for that is “parasite”. You really can’t?
Edit: The image I was thinking of, originally by Evan Prodromou (founder of WikiTravel) (here under CC-by 2.5 Canada):
The post the image is from is well worth reading, as are its comments, if you have a business plan that involves others doing the content creation unpaid.
While I’m in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, “no benefit” isn’t exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they’re taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That’s work that benefits me.
What about when they start sending DMCA takedown notices with your name on them?
That I wouldn’t approve of, but the possibility that some people misuse your work is the risk you take when setting it free. Besides, I’m pretty sure that they would be the ones who’d take the hit from that, once I had made clear that I had nothing to do with it and my work continued to be available for all.
It’d be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.
This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn’t hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no ‘ick’ reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they’re entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
Hmm … Castify doesn’t have any other content (and thus, no subscribers) yet. They’re literally brand new; the castify.co domain was registered last month. They don’t have an audience yet to which to expose or promote LW.
For me, this whole exercise pattern-matches much closer to “a tech startup promoting itself in a known technophilic community” than to “an effort seriously designed to maximize accessibility and promotion of the content” or a crowdsourcing ripoff of the sort David Gerard is describing. (The Wikitravel case is pretty icky, but it doesn’t resemble this case much at all.)
Not that an act can’t be both a promotion and an accessibility effort; and it’s pretty low-risk for LW, but on the other hand —
— how much do you usually charge for endorsements?
Ever? That’s pretty strong. Even conditioned on the existence of audiobooks of HPMOR — which cannot be commercially done?
The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven’t done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven’t done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don’t want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what’s in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.
What’s offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we’d like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.
That was why we created this discussion in the first place.
Can we be less rude to people that aren’t used to our community’s discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn’t going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.
The problem is that the arrangement posited is in fact odious, and that that aspect is important. If you have a word of equal accuracy that concisely communicates the problematic nature of the posited arrangement, I’m all ears.
In this case, the point would be just as strong with no word there instead. “Odious” is also a good word, come to think of it—not “you are odious” but “the arrangement is odious, because you seek to make money by other people’s uncompensated labor,” assume that’s in fact the business model.
It is trivially true that people may gain from their work being published, even in the absence of remuneration from the publisher. For example, it may contain product placement they are being paid for, it may gain fans they can later sell products to, or it may spread ideas they wish to see popularized. Indeed, in the absence of these “parasites”, many of these would willingly pay for their work to be published, and indeed some do.
In this case, the articles in question were not made to provide this site with ad revenue or because they were commissioned by some wealthy individual, they were made to be read, and to inform others of their contents regarding rationality. Anything that allows more people to access this material aids that goal, and as such this deal is mutually beneficial to both parties. Of course, it would be nice if someone was willing to pay, but frankly none of us are going to pay (or donate our time) to produce such material, and we are fortunate that there is someone who expects sufficient benefit from this.
Who do you mean when you say everyone? Do you think that billions of people are going to share those recordings for free? Even more perplexing. If you think that they do, having a subset of your collection be shared by billions would probably have a very good return on the investment because it promotes your website and not all the products of your website have to be CC-BY-SA.
For most commerical successful infoproducts it’s possible to download them for free on some file sharing platform. People pay for those products usually because they think it’s fair to pay the creator of the product in return for the value that they created.
Most of that time file sharing is illegal but websites like Zenhabits show that successful businesses who give up on all copyright protection for their work do exist.
Very true. It’s hard to know how everyone will use the files once they get them onto the computer. What would happen if we released all copyright protection like Zenhabits? I have no idea. It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how it would play out in reality. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but we do have Eliezer’s large essay “The Simple Truth” available for free so people can try out the service.
LessWrong is a unique situation for us. Most of the other blogs we will be partnering with are written by a sole blogger who will want us to use some form of copyright protection. This is why we’ve asked for opinions on the topic here to see what everyone would like to do.
I personally think that an opt-out or opt-in system seems the most fair as it gives the individual the option.
There are two different kinds of freedom. People can download “The Simple Truth” from you without paying anything. They however are not free to remix it and create derivative works based on it.
On your end I don’t see a need to license every recording the same way. Specifically it wouldn’t cost much to make an experiement. Two channels with similar LessWrong content. At the start ask every author for permission.
One channel gets a closed license the other gets CC-BY-SA. Both get the same price. It would be interesting to know the practical effects. Does the closed license channel sell better? How widely will the CC-BY-SA content get distributed?
What’s the business model, you bear the costs of recording audio and take a share (or all) of the profits, or the writer (LW in this case) bears the costs and you split the profits? Most people seem fine with CC-BY, you could tweak the split or the fee for the odd person that wants CC-BY-SA until it’s profitable again (or eat part of the cost to keep a client happy, if LW brings in enough business otherwise.
Well, yeah, you can.