When we were kids, cartoons taught us not to steal, to stand up for what was right, to always tell the truth… and by and large, we as a generation have listened to what we were taught on Saturday mornings. If you had a chance to influence the next generation of children… so what should I teach them?. Software patents are bad? Free speech, free beer? Something to do with filetrading? What are the themes or morals that you’d want to pass on to your children, so they can make intelligent decisions about all the propaganda they’ll get fed in the next few years? Is there anything Papa Smurf could have promoted that would have made your life easier, growing up?
I’m still in the midst of putting this idea into proper prose, but here is a rough outline of how I see DSR:Fusion working in its final form. The idea is to create a bit of a walled garden (oh the irony!) wherein artists can partner with “producers” to make crazily-innovative Creative Commons-licensed works, sell them, and actually earn money from it. More than that, it would try and implement my idea for micro-attribution, meaning that every influence and every borrowed character in the system would, when used, end up benefiting their creator. Anyway, try and follow this logic:
THE PROCESS
- Artist creates pitch package, defines timeline and price;
- Producers invest a portion of the required funds until the target is met;
(if not enough investors can be found after 6 weeks, project is cancelled and must start over)
- Once approved, the artist begins production, making weekly progress reports;
(if, at any weekly report, investors are unhappy with progress, they can withhold payment until satisfied)
- The artist completes the work and is paid. Work is released for download via Dustrunners.com;
(work is CC-NC-SA, so can be distributed freely for non-commercial purposes)
- Distributor makes proposal to re-sell work, describing market plans, resale price and payment schedule;
(creators of the work (including producers) do not need to propose resale strategies)
(‘owners’ of the work accept or reject the proposal)
- Once approved, the reseller produces and resells the work, remitting 50% of profits to Dustrunners.com along with detailed sales figures;
(if no sales are made, payment is not required)
(any reseller found defrauding the owners will have their reseller license terminated and may be subject to legal action by Dustrunners.com)
- Dustrunners.com distributes funds to the artists and producers (70% to artists, 30% split among producers according to investment ratio), along with all sales figures;
(dustrunners.com takes a small administrative fee before splitting the profits)
- After 7 years, the license changes to CC-C-SA, but resellers may still register with the site.
WORLDBUILDING AND POINTS
- Any new concept (character, vehicle, technology, place etc) created in any work should be registered in the wiki;
- The originator of any article is credited as the “creator”;
- Every article is itself covered by CC-NC-SA, but special permission is given to those working within Dustrunners.com to use them for commercial purposes;
- Creators set a point value for their creation (norms are suggested by default);
- Any project is made up of different influences worth different values. Some created by the project owners, some borrowed from other projects;
- An influence is not considered “part of the project” unless it makes an appearance. Simply referring to it doesn’t count as a “use”;
- The act of creating new art using the various influences should always be worth approximately the same amount as the sum point value of the influences (so if all the imported elements are worth 500 points, the writer who strings them into a compelling story should get 500 points as well);
- Any revenue generated by the project must be divided up according to the point ratios. So a completely original story would allocate 100% of its profits to the writer, but for a “collage” story, the author would only collect 50% of the profits, and the rest would go to his influences.
As you can see, it’s half-baked, but it’s a start.
And yes, I count this as my daily mandatory DustWiki entry. Thbbbt.
Here we all are, tending to our special crops. We work tirelessly in our spare time, our break time, our sleep time… we carefully grow our pet projects into something the world will enjoy. And yet we can’t focus our energies there. Most of us have day jobs, slogging away at uninspired programs that almost feel conceived solely to keep us busy. Today, there’s no effective way to earn a living from writing open source software, because it’s “free”. The result? The GPL is relegating some truly brilliant programmers to being hobbyist inventors, and it is because there is no mechanism in the GPL for paying them for what they’ve contributed.
The GPL is a genius creation. It’s a license and a way of life, letting information flow freely, and letting us better ourselves through full and honest communication. It is a statement of the reality the Internet brought: you cannot control data, so don’t even try… see where the data brings you. It is best employed by true believers, because when you have that sense of wonderment, you can grasp opportunities the more cautious would ignore. Its principle restriction is that there be no restrictions.
But the sad reality is, there is no real way for the average person to be paid for writing that code. You can support it, sure, but that’s just a question of changing day jobs, and your coding is still an afterthought. You might get lucky and base a company around the software, but that’s still double the work for half the pay. So if an outside corporation can take the code you worked on tirelessly, and turn it into a best-selling product, why should you be left out of the profits? It was built on your back.
The flaw is not in what the GPL says, but what it leaves unsaid. There’s an assumption among developers that we follow the spirit of the license regardless of what’s in the actual text. And some of us believe in that spirit so strongly that we don’t appreciate that there is a whole layer of industry out there whose sole purpose it is to acquire and exploit the resources we develop. They don’t feel guilty that their Mercedes was paid for by the night you had that extra coffee at 3am, and they don’t care if you got reprimanded for oversleeping the next day. You’re free labour to them. They believe in the GPL as much as Amazon believes in Chinese communism: if it gets them profits, it’s a pill they can swallow.
We need to amend the GPL to make this “ecosystem” work. This is not about changing the text of the document, but upholding the spirit we see in it. Let the source stay bundled with the binaries, make the software freely distributable, let the code be an ambassador for a libre culture… but let’s wade into the dark, murky water of money. Let us also say that anyone using the code for commercial purposes must remit a percentage of profits back to the project that made it.
With the addition of that one line, the world shifts. None of the activities we programmers enjoy are hampered in any way, and we can continue to produce and improve our projects in our own time. But anyone slapping a box round a distro and selling it for $100 is no longer free of their moral obligations to the programmers they use. Take $10 from every copy sold, give it back to the community, let it be sub-divided and paid out according to whatever formula makes sense. If a programmer gets $5/month from one small swatch of code, we’ve made progress.
Once the promise is there, more programmers will contribute. They’ll do it for the GPL, and they’ll do it in the hopes of escaping their dreary day jobs. A good bit of code can find its way into so many different projects, and with each one, so does the potential for income. Just like a songwriter with a classic tune can live on royalties for a lifetime, so too should a programmer be able to survive solely on their passion. If more programmers had that baseline of income from the efforts they made in the past, they would have more time to dream up the next great innovation. Humankind only ventured into literature and drama once the threat of starvation had been subdued: we need to free ourselves from the fear of poverty so that we can fully realize the potential we have in us.
The GPL is a great document that outlines the ideals we hold dear in this IP-laden world. But we need to ask ourselves: why must our free software utopia come at someone’s expense — especially our own?
Today NASA cut funding to the Great MoonBuggy Race, its annual event that teaches students all over the world the science behind the moon landings. There’s a petition online to convince them to keep the races alive. Pass it on!
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Read: Slashdot and then more on Groklaw. Trademarks for Linux. This relates to my ongoing obsession. I’ll speak about it in terms of DSR, which is where the fun is.
It’s established that Dustrunners is being released, nuts and bolts and all, under a CC-NC-SA license. So you can write you own story, draw pics of characters, or really do anything you like with the idea with almost no restrictions (except for commercial, which is an issue for another post). So if anyone can write about Spastik and create their own books based on him, what’s to stop someone from writing absolute garbage about Spaz and effectively muddying the waters for everyone else?
That’s where the trademark comes in. The Dustrunners trademark is controlled by the central body, and is not freely useable. If you write a DSR-themed story and want to use the official wordmark, you have to get it authorized. To be authorized, your work needs to pass a test of being canonical… which is to say, Spastik has to be a human male from Australia, and not a cyborg woman from the planet Butu. Assuming the content checks out as being inline with the worldview consensus on the afore-mentioned DustWiki, you would be granted the use of the Dustrunners name and logo for your work.
Now that’s not to say that not being canonical marks the end of your existence. There may be stories that emerge that break too much from the DSR world but are fundamentally cool. They could still thrive out on the wild net without and hindrance, because the CC license still allows Spastik to roam free. The only restriction would be that it could not be called “Dustrunners” (although the term “dustrunner” would still be useable in the stories themselves).
A trademark is like a quality assurance emblem. It says “yes, this is a Dustrunners story, and it conforms to the standards you expect.” Watching or reading one DSR-branded show will keep you in the same familiar world as in the last one you saw. As with Linux, it’s not about cashing in on a term, it’s about ensuring that the end-user can trust something based on its cover, to some degree.
