do you reference wikipedia? why is it useful?

Creative Commons Deed

This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.

You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
• to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

With the understanding that:

• Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
• Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
  • your fair dealing or fair use rights;
  • the author's moral rights; and
  • rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
• Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

full article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

a social good

in japan, legions of manga fans attend their comics convention every year.

a large portion of the work on display is fan created. maybe its a manga done by a secondary school's manga club. maybe its a group of friends who are manga fans.

who got together to make their own manga thats based on their favourite manga. it could have been samurai X. and their version could have a black girl as samurai X. or maybe it could have been a homosexual version. or an hentai version. or one with a different take altogether - maybe its told from the view of kauru instead of kenshin?

and all that culture would be impossible in a normal copyrighted world. because they would not have permission from the creators of the original works to base their derivatives on.

in uk, morrissey had this to say about EMI :

"Morrissey does not approve such releases and would ask people not to bother buying them. Morrissey receives no royalty payments from EMI for any back catalogue, and has not received a royalty from EMI since 1992."

we do not know how much of what we pay when we buy a cd from hmv actually goes to the artist. it'd help if every artist had his or her own website to sell their work directly to fans.

all in all, we have to realise that a copyright is a temporary distribution monopoly granted by the public to the artist to help him or her fund the next creation. the moment a work is copyrighted, it belongs to the public - the copyright grants only the distribution rights to the creator for a limited time - when the time is up, the work will be fully owned by the public. so that society will gain from the enjoyment of more creations. note that people created works even before copyright was invented. and artists who did not want to relinquish ownership of the work to the public can choose not to publish a work. copyright is supposed to encourage more creation.

if copyright starts to fail to encourage the creation of more works, then society should look at whether copyright is useful at all in its current form, and change it, or even remove it.