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The Anne Rice Memorial Content License
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:51 am on 3/12/2003
Remember when Anne Rice took out that two-page ad in the New Yorker and other publications, on the eve of the release of the film version of Interview with the Vampire? She added a notice on her long, somewhat defensive statement on the film - a notice stating that any media source could quote her as long as they quoted the entire two-page statement.
This, of course, guaranteed that no one would quote her; they’d just talk about her statement in vague ways because they didn’t have the room to reprint it. So maybe Rice’s decision wasn’t useful the way she thought it would be, and maybe it was. But some recent talk about the Creative Commons licenses, and other free software-inspired legal licenses for text and other media content, has me thinking. Via Creative Commons’ own weblog, here’s a bit from attorney Tim Hadley (I’m trying to help the word “attorney” become part of his name, like Mighty Joe Young) quoting, er, someone named Phil:
Suppose you write a heartfelt and deeply personal post about the difficulties of academic life. If someone from academic-challenges.com asks to republish it, you would probably say yes. If someone from whiney-pointyheads.com asked, you would probably say no, if it wasn’t for the fact that you’ve already said yes by virtue of your CC license.
A licensing option (that won’t make sense unless you’ve read about Creative Commons’ licensing app and general mission, which you should really do) that lets you forbid the partial quoting of your content, would not ameliorate problems like the above. It may also already be covered under the “derivative works” options CC already provides. If not, it may in fact actually fly in the face of fair use - briefly quoting things for sake of argument or study has pretty much always been legal. We don’t even know for sure if Anne Rice’s stipulation on her New Yorker statement would stand up in court.
We do, however, already know that quoting out of context is a political weapon of great power. It might improve our national discourse to eliminate some of that power. And when it comes to the whole machine-readable, “metadata” side of CC, this would be easily integrated into a sufficiently smart set of social software. Any software smart enough to observe these kinds of licenses, though, would be smart enough to break them as well.
Just some preliminary thoughts. Good idea? Bad idea?
March 12th, 2003 at 11:07 am
The “Phil” in that entry refers to Phil Ringnalda. (http://www.philringnalda.com).
I imagine that fair use would cover quotation of limited excerpts from Rice’s advertisement regardless of the limitation she placed on it. Fair use probably would not allow wholesale copying of the entire ad. Several fair use cases have suggested that a “take what you need to make your commentary, but don’t go too far” principle applies to quoting and parodic imitation.
Treating Rice’s attempt at a restriction as a licensing term doesn’t really make much sense, because no one needs a license to quote her anyway. Rice’s restriction does offer a license allowing people to copy amounts beyond what fair use would allow if they copy the whole thing, but it doesn’t render fair use copying illegal.
Thanks for the mention. You’ve got a little typo on my name up there, by the way!