As Willingham writes in his release: "The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want."
Willingham describes how his participation in the entertainment industry has made him *more* skeptical of IP, not less. He proposes capping copyright at 20 years, with a single, 10-year extension for works that are sold onto third parties.
43/
I can't speak for Creative Commons (it's been more than 20 years since I was their EU Director), but I'm *positive* that there are copyfighting lawyers out there who'd *love* to work on a project like this.
I think Willingham is onto something here. After all, *Fables* is *built* on the public domain.
42/
Indeed, that's the *best case* scenario - defects in a license could result in downstream users, their collaborators, investors, and distributors being sued for millions of dollars, costing them everything they have, up to and including their homes.
Which isn't to say that this is dead on arrival - far from it! Just that there is work to be done.
41/
Making a bug-free license is *hard*. A failure on Willingham's part to correctly enumerate or convey the limitations of such a license - to list which parts of *Fables* DC might sue you for using - could result in downstream users having their hard work censored out of existence by legal threats.
40/
You can't just put a CC license on the song with an asterisked footnote that reads "just the bass, though."
CC *had* a sampling license: the "Sampling Plus 1.0" license. It was a *mess*. Licensees couldn't figure out what parts of works they were allowed to use, and licensors couldn't figure out how to coney that. It's been "retired."
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/
38/
So maybe Willingham should create his own bespoke license for *Fables*. That may be what he has to do, in fact. But boy is that a fraught business. Remember the army of top lawyers who created the CC licenses? They missed a crucial bug in the first three versions, and billions of works have been licensed under those earlier versions. This has enabled a mob of crooked #CopyleftTrolls (like @PixsyHQ) to prey on the unwary, raking in a fortune:
39/
You can't just put a CC license on the song with an asterisked footnote that reads "just the bass, though."
CC *had* a sampling license: the "Sampling Plus 1.0" license. It was a *mess*. Licensees couldn't figure out what parts of works they were allowed to use, and licensors couldn't figure out how to coney that. It's been "retired."
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/
38/
That's a thorny question. What Willingham really wants here is a #sampling license - a license that allows licensees to take *some* of the elements of his work, combine them with other parts, and make something new.
But no CC license fits that description. Every CC license applies to *whole* works. If you want to license the bass-line from your song but not the melody, you have to release the bass-line separately and put a CC license on *that*.
37/
20 years on, these licenses are pretty robust. The flaws in earlier versions have been discovered and repaired in subsequent revisions. They have been adapted to multiple countries' legal systems, allowing CC users to mix-and-match works from many territories - animating Polish sprites to tell a story by a Canadian, set to music from the UK.
Willingham could clarify his "public domain" dedication by applying a Creative Commons license to *Fables*, but which license?
36/
These IP tripwires proliferate in the shadows, wherever doodles are sketched on napkins, wherever kindergartners apply finger-paint to construction-paper. But for all that they are continuously springing into existence, and enduring for a century or more, they are absurdly hard to give away.
This was the key insight behind the nostr:npub17cuf4umda7yx773gsx2g3zy8xy2cee6u25k2na40hezwd4vrytlsd3rcg7 project.
34/
Copyrights are conjured into existence the instant that a new creative work is fixed in a tangible medium and endure until the creator's has been dead for 70 years. Common-law trademarks gradually come into definition like an image appearing on photo-paper in a chemical soup, growing in definition every time they are used, even if the mark's creator never files a form with the USPTO.
33/
Remember, this all started because Willingham didn't have the resources or patience to tangle with the rabid attack-lawyers Warners keeps kenneled on its Burbank lot. Warners can (and may) release those same lawyers on *you*, even if you are likely to prevail in court, betting that you - like Willingham - won't have the resources to defend yourself.
The strange reality of "IP" rights is that they can be secured without any affirmative step on your part.
32/
But these adaptations probably can't draw too closely on the artwork, or the logos. You can probably make novelizations of the comics. Maybe you can make new comics that use the same scripts but different art. You can probably make sequels to, or spinoffs of, the existing comics, provided you come up with your own character designs.
But it's murky. Very murky.
31/
Customers and critics and competitors can't avoid those tripwires, and which confer upon the lawyer's client the right to sue for anything that displeases them.
When Willingham says he's releasing *Fables* into the public domain, it's not clear what he's releasing - and what is his to release. In the colloquial, business sense of "IP," saying you're "releasing the IP" means something like, "Feel free to create adaptations from this."
30/
There's also a bestiary of obscure cousins and subspecies - trade dress, trade secrecy, service marks, noncompetes, nondisclosues, anticirumvention rights, sui generis "neighboring rights" and so on.
The job of an "IP lawyer" is to pluck individual doctrines from this incoherent scrapheap of laws and regulations and weave them together into a spider's web of tripwires.
29/
When Willingham says he is releasing the "IP" to his comic, he is using the phrase in its commercial sense, not its legal sense. When business people speak of "owning IP," they mean that they believe they have the legal right to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
27/
The problem is that this doesn't correspond to the *legal* concept of IP, because *IP* isn't actually a legal concept. While there are plenty of "IP lawyers" and even "IP law firms," there is no "IP law." There are many laws that are lumped together under "IP," including the big three (trademark, copyright and patent).
28/
When Willingham says he is releasing the "IP" to his comic, he is using the phrase in its commercial sense, not its legal sense. When business people speak of "owning IP," they mean that they believe they have the legal right to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
27/
That's not surprising; while Willingham doesn't say so, it's vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who's-who of comics greats for *Fables*). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn't have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books.
26/
Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what nostr:npub1eyszugs46q4ngd8tgeysnkwve20n9wewj42lac9cp7s2jrk52u2qce6x02 calls an act of "absolute table-flip badassery" - he has announced that *Fables* will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.
Now, this is *huge*, and it's also *shrewd*.
24/
It's the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner's fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It's delicious.
But it's also *muddy*. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can reproduce the existing comics.
25/
Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what nostr:npub1eyszugs46q4ngd8tgeysnkwve20n9wewj42lac9cp7s2jrk52u2qce6x02 calls an act of "absolute table-flip badassery" - he has announced that *Fables* will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.
Now, this is *huge*, and it's also *shrewd*.
24/
Even after he won that fight, the company tried to cheat him and then cover it up by binding him to a nondisclosure agreement.
This was the culmination of a string of wage-thefts in which the company misreported his royalties and had to be dragged into paying him his due. When the company "practically dared" Willingham to sue ("knowing it would be a long and debilitating process") he snapped.
23/