[Commons-l] Fwd: Ghost Works survey - Chilling effects of copyright

[David Gerard]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au>
Date: 2008/6/16
Subject: Ghost Works survey - Chilling effects of copyright
To: discussion at fsfeurope.org


Howdy all,

The Question Copyright folks are launching a new effort around the
chilling effect of copyright: specifically, the effect of works where
the only thing stopping the work getting out is the cloud of copyright
questions.

They use the term "Ghost Works" for these never-made or never-released
works <URL:http://questioncopyright.org/ghost_works_survey>:

    In the article "Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?", we defined a ghost
    work as a creative work that never got made, or was made but not
    released, because copyright concerns prevented it from being
    started or from being distributed. Since then, informal
    conversations with artists, publishers and others have made it
    very clear that such suppression is a common event, much more
    common than most people think. But the public rarely hears about
    it, because no one does publicity for a work that doesn't exist.

    The purpose of the Ghost Works Survey is twofold: to demonstrate
    the scope and scale of this phenomenon by gathering and
    organizing as much data about it as we can, and to highlight
    compelling individual stories of artists and other creators who
    had their work thwarted by copyright restrictions. The survey
    will not attempt to catalogue every ghost work — there are
    likely far too many, given that almost every artist we've talked
    to so far has a story of a work they had to alter or lay aside
    due to copyright concerns. Rather, we'll focus on qualitative
    results: we want to collect enough stories to discern large-scale
    patterns, so we can understand and publicize the effects of
    copyright suppression. For more information, see the projects
    page.

--
 \     "I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then |
 `\        I thought 'Why should I? He never reads any of mine.'"  -- |
_o__)                                                   Spike Milligan |
Ben Finney

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