Copyright and Creative Commons questions:

We find that a lot of producers, even beginners, are quite concerned with the Creative Commons requirement we impose on members. Below is an example of a message sent to one member who, after weeks of using equipment for free through the membership program, decided he wanted to avoid the Creative Commons requirement and retain exclusive copyright to his work.

Question 1: 

Tony,

I think its important for me to have full ownership and rights over my project and I'm not comfortable with the Creative Commons restrictions in the Membership agreement. Can I retro-actively pay rental rates for the equipment I've used and keep complete ownership?

Answer 1: 

Member (name removed),
If you decide you don’t want to air this on our station and you need exclusive copyright (I really have no idea why you’d do that), then we’ll retro-actively charge you commercial rental rates for all use to-date and moving forward. Its $35 to $100 per use of the camera, $15-$30 per use of tripod, some more for the light kit, microphones, etc. Rates are posted at deproduction.org

In my opinion, Creative Commons is the right way to go, no matter what. It doesn’t prevent you from submitting to sundance, from selling DVDs, from selling to the Outdoor Life Network, etc, it just allows us to air the show on our channel and allows other nonprofit broadcasters to do so, giving you the visibility you need. In my opinion, that’s the best avenue for you because it gets your work seen, and in my opinion, it is naïve and counter to the mission of public access to feel that you’re better off protecting your work from the only groups who will likely help you get it in front of viewers.

To be blunt, if you want to cling to copyright, you should be working with rental houses, not a public access station. You’re working with us because you need the help, you need visibility, you need to learn. Personally, everything I create is Creative Commons, and I wouldn’t have any of the opportunities I have now if I had tucked my initial projects into a box where nobody would ever see them, hoping that would maximize some financial return for me. It won’t. 99.9% of projects created never earn a profit, and would be far better served by a CC license. The vast majority of those that do earn a profit would likewise be better served by a CC license.

I am certain that the vast majority of objections people have to Creative Commons is a result of their misunderstanding of what Creative Commons is.