CCANZ and Cultural Funding

My job so far as an intern has been to look into the issue of public access to funded cultural content with an aim to CCANZ making a submission to the NZ On Air Board in February. I have completed research into the history of broadcasting funding in New Zealand and overseas and will provide a brief summary of my findings here shortly.

This may be slightly off-topic, but I've been talking to a few musician friends who get a trickle of royalties from APRA, and they are warning their members off CreativeCommons. APRA see themselves as part of a gentlemen's agreement with the record industry, which means they are obliged by truce to side with the likes of the RIAA against CC, as we are a soft supporter of "piracy". It's seemed to sit in the too-hard-basket every since (or perhaps cautious ongoing discussions have been happening behind the scenes...).

Anyway, I think it's high time we tackled APRA. If we are going to seriously push for CC use attached to arts funding, we need them onside. All they need to understand is that advising their clients to use a NC license allows both the artists and APRA to effectively carry on as before. Frankly I think anyone who sells someone's musical recording without asking them first, and sharing the earnings (unless there is a more permissive CC license of course) doesn't need our urgent protection nearly as much a teenagers sharing favourite tunes on mixtapes and making mash-ups for YouTube.

My thoughts on the position we should take to NZ On Air is best summed up here on the cc-nz list:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-nz/2013-December/001089.html

I agree, of course, with your thoughts on APRA, though I'm not sure where it sits in our list of priorities -- not because it isn't important, but because dealing with collecting societies on copyright issues is notoriously difficult. APRA, as far as I can tell, have never been friendly to CC.

I've also been focussed on state-funded works, simply because the argument is clear, and there is a greater likelihood of success.

Does anyone know more about APRA than I do, and is willing to shed some light on the likelihood of success here?

My hunch is that NZ on Air and other public funders will only take CC seriously when we have a critical mass of support from creative workers and their collectives (bands, studios, art spaces, project groups etc). As long as the people in APRA (and any other people who have mana in the music/ tv/ film industry) keep feeding out an anti-CC line, we are unlikely to get that support. On the other hand, if we can convince these people that CC can help creative workers connect with their audience and make a living from their work (again, economic case studies are important here), this could precipitate mass buy-in from the arts and culture sector.

There are two levels of strategy to this:
1) @mattmcgregor making contact with APRA, and trying to line up a high-level lobbying meeting.
2) the CC Mentors network, particularly those of us active in arts and culture, offering talks, presentations, panel discussions, workshops etc at conferences and networking events which artists, writers, musicians, and tv/ film people attend.

BTW How's @conalthompson going with writing up his report on broadcasting funding?

This is exciting -- and of course I would encourage everyone to always feel free to spread the word about CC.

CCANZ has prioritised working to open publicly funded copyright works, and I think we're having a reasonable amount of success on that front.

I can chip away at this issue -- write case studies, go to as many events as I can manage -- but I can't promise it the kind of dedicated energy that it undeniably deserves without giving up some of our other work. Given that that work is going quite well, I wouldn't want to do that.

Conal's paper was less a public report than a series of summaries on how other countries fund broadcasting, and how those works are licensed. The potted summary is that there are various experiments going on, but nothing close to CC licensing, and nothing that could be categorised as open.

I can share it with anyone who is interested. It didn't occur to me to add to the CCANZ site, as it's not really about CC licensing at all, and was intended to serve a very specific purpose. But I could add it as a blog post, as it was an interesting overview.

The Turnbull Library's figures from their digital music collections found CC licences on 300/3500 items - around 8.5%.

I found this very heartening. Also, the numbers seem to be rising: in 2012/2013, CC licensing rose to 10%, or 100/1000 items collected.

http://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/turnbull-3-rise-of-the-mixtape

I have been investigating CC music recently, mainly using BandCamp and Jamendo, and "Queeting" my finds using the hashtag #ccmusic. I've found a few kiwi musicians using CC this way. This is part of the scoping for some CC music related projects I intend to work on when my book is finished.

I think there is a willingness to experiment on the part of the musicians themselves, as evidenced by the comments about Spotify from Phoenix Foundation's Sam Scott on RadioNZ (his interviews starts six and a half minutes into the program). The chokepoint appears to be the intermediaries who stand to lose their toll booth in the new models, everyone from traditional record labels (contrast Sam's comments with those of Jim Pinckney of the Round Trip Mars label whose interview is 8 mins into the same program) to the breweries who parasite off live music venues, as described by Blink of A Low Hum in his book about the NZ music industry. Maybe I'm wrong about engaging with APRA and CC ANZ would be better to engage directly with kiwi musicians and support their experiments with new models?