Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Start remixing Start the Clock

Well, putting "The Orange" and "Embracing-the-New" under a Creative Commons license (as originally noted here) elicited such lovely things that I have decided to go further this time!

"Start the Clock" was written as part of Jay Lake and Frank Wu's Exquisite Corpuscle project, a chaintale anthology in which a painting inspired a story, which inspired a poem, which inspired a play, and so on, with the creator of each work seeing only the work preceding it in the chain -- like a game of Telephone. The anthology should be coming out from Wheatland Press this spring, but Jay and Frank were kind enough to not ask for First Serial Rights, so I published the story in F&SF last August.

I am now releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. This means that not only can you redistribute the story noncommercially without asking me (put it on balloons, read it as part of your wedding, etc.), as long as you credit me -- as you can with "The Orange" and "Embracing-the-New" -- now you can create noncommercial derivative works as well, as long as you credit me and distribute your works under the same license (that is, you allow people to remix the remixes). So you can make movies, comic books, sequels, etc. to "Start the Clock". You only have to ask me if you find yourself getting money for your derivative works (although I'd love to see any derivative works, regardless).

Remixing seems particularly appropriate for this story, since as part of the Exquisite Corpuscle, it was written as a response to Diana Sherman's play "Summer Children", and Mary Anne Mohanraj wrote a poem in response to it.

It may be hubristic to assume that anyone will want to remix "Start the Clock". (Also, I should point out, you don't really need any kind of license to simply allude to, parody, be inspired by, or imitate a work -- fair use is very broad). But the idea is kind of fun. And I feel strongly about growing the Commons from which all art feeds -- especially now, in the midst of a vast corporate intellectual-property land grab to rival the agricultural enclosures of the eighteenth century, which similarly disenfranchised legions of essential customary rights. (I'm talking about things like patents on genes, perennial revisions of the copyright law to extend licenses, the insane growth of patent law to cover trivial business processes and obvious software algorithms -- One-Click buying, "multimedia" and the like, and successful lobbying by copyright holders to try and cripple technology by law to make it easier for them to enforce [and invent!] their "rights".)