Still, I want to say thank you to both of you for sharing your thoughts and insight.

Dawn: To make one suggestion, I would encourage you to take a look at Media Temple for hosting. It’s been good to me and this site. If you need other hosting recommendations, I’ll gladly pass a few along, I’ve been around the block a few times on these issues.

Still, I want to say thank you to both of you for sharing your thoughts and insight.

Dawn: To make one suggestion, I would encourage you to take a look at Media Temple for hosting. It’s been good to me and this site. If you need other hosting recommendations, I’ll gladly pass a few along, I’ve been around the block a few times on these issues.

Certain costs might have dropped in terms of replication, but there’s still significant cost involved in creation if one is not a thief and/or lucky enough to have others pay their overheads. Also prints aren’t exactly cheap for all they’re easily available. Many of the printing services either cost the artist or take a large percentage of the profit.

A free market is one thing, a market that is basically being sabotaged by selfish myth spreading groups and ignorant people is quite another. I don’t mind competing with artists who’ve got some business sense, but when I’m getting cheated out of paying jobs because people are basically painting career artists as selfish and greedy for asking for payment for their work? That is kind of irritating. That’s one of the things I don’t like about Creative commons, is the starry eyed idea being put forward by it that by using it one is automatically helping other artists when in reality it can have the exact opposite effect.

Unfortunately since I am still on the look out for a decent host and designing my website again, the only existing portfolio I have is the one linked under my name which is a bit of a hodge podge of older digital work, sketches, and generally unfinished items. I really need to update that fully and clean it up, but I just haven’t had time with my offline business.

I realize that what I said about things going into the public domain was a simplification, but it was generally
true. Once published, without the copyright marking or registration, and the work was in the public domain.

I am also aware that overhead’s have not necessarily dropped for you. However, publication and distribution costs have dropped for many types of digital media, as well as content creation costs for many types as well.
This has produced a lower barrier to entry for creation of those types, allowing more artists to participate.
Thus you have more lower cost works available on the market, driving profits down for people like you.
This is the reality, and I can’t say that I would like higher costs, greater barriers to entry or even fewer
artists. That is the market you are in, you have to deal with it. While I support a reasonable copyright, I
also support the free market.

By the way Dawn, do you have an on-line portfolio? I would love to see your work.

Much of the cheap poor quality work flooding the art market is not just down to CC work. The ignorant CC users are really the final hole in the dam as it were.

I have never argued that artists don’t have a right to give their art away for free if they knowing do so. Indeed, I myself do produce the occasional reusable piece. I however do not think willful ignorance is a reasonable excuse for damaging the already depressed art market. To me the problem lies not only in the poor spread of real information on CC licenses but also the refusal of many artists to educate themselves in precisely what those licenses mean and do.

What I’d like is for a load of myths that CC is reinforcing to go away, the myth that artists “have” to give their work away for free being one. The myth that artists are “selfish” or “controlling” if they choose not to give away their art is another. My problem is more in line with being put out by what I see as the poor marketing of CC and ignorance/corruption of it’s grass roots level promotion which is putting further pressure on artists to meet a specific set of myths which are basically spread by people who are only interested in one thing, getting their hands on the hard work of others without paying for it.

What I was commenting on was your assumption that overheads have dropped, they have not, if one actually does pay them. The only time overheads are low or non-existent is when someone is perhaps still living at home with their parents paying the bills, using a computer that their parents brought them and using pirated software. Overheads remain as high as ever. Whether someone pays them or not depends on their situation and/or their moral compass.

Not all of us are in the US which has always been notorious for red tape on copyright policies. My mistake, 1920 is generally regarded as the watershed for public domain/copyrighted content, ie anything before 1920 can be reasonably assumed to be in the public domain. However the act of 1978 you talk about? Prior to that work could only go into the public domain if it was published and lacked a declaration of copyright. The key word there being “published”. Unpublished works were protected under state copyright law while the 1909 copyright law regarding published works with statements of copyright came under federal law in the US. So no, works did not just leap straight into public domain the minute they were finished in the US prior to that. In other countries the dates and times are different, though for some reason people always seem to think US copyright law is applicable everywhere when in fact it’s not and there are some significant differences between the US standards and other Berne convention member nation standards.

The impression you gave in your prior comment that I responded to? Was almost one of anger at copyright itself and those who support it.

Certain costs might have dropped in terms of replication, but there’s still significant cost involved in creation if one is not a thief and/or lucky enough to have others pay their overheads. Also prints aren’t exactly cheap for all they’re easily available. Many of the printing services either cost the artist or take a large percentage of the profit.

A free market is one thing, a market that is basically being sabotaged by selfish myth spreading groups and ignorant people is quite another. I don’t mind competing with artists who’ve got some business sense, but when I’m getting cheated out of paying jobs because people are basically painting career artists as selfish and greedy for asking for payment for their work? That is kind of irritating. That’s one of the things I don’t like about Creative commons, is the starry eyed idea being put forward by it that by using it one is automatically helping other artists when in reality it can have the exact opposite effect.

Unfortunately since I am still on the look out for a decent host and designing my website again, the only existing portfolio I have is the one linked under my name which is a bit of a hodge podge of older digital work, sketches, and generally unfinished items. I really need to update that fully and clean it up, but I just haven’t had time with my offline business.