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It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.
But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.
Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Saturday March 28 2015, @06:28AM
You can find some more creative commons music at Jamendo [jamendo.com] and Magnatune. [magnatune.com]
For sound effects there's Freesound. [freesound.org]
For pixel art there's OpenGameArt. [opengameart.org]
There's a plethora of free and/or open source game engines too, search one up if you like (I prefer to create my own, but don't do that, I'm crazy).
Don't forget, without remixing the public domain, Walt Disney wouldn't have had most of his creations. Everyone borrows from the public domain. New works that borrow nothing from culture must invent new language, new harmonic scales, new concepts of humour, etc. I have tried doing so and the work was too alien to be culturally relevant (except to a few linguists, who are still only partially finished decoding the self-teaching lexicon). Neurology dictates the formula for humour and aesthetically pleasing acoustic, literary, and visual art. Thus, if your art is for human consumption it will utilize methods long established to convey wordplay, mood, etc. even given a completely new symbolic language. E.g., one can not invent the concept of a pun within the new language, one can only apply the existing concept to the language. Inventing new alien forms of "humour" just isn't funny to humans because human humour plays on the expectations of the audience, and these are expectations are based on common cultural experiences which must be borrowed from to create humorous experiences; The same is true of harmonic melodies, and visual arts, etc.
It's a shame to see copyright become so draconian. There is a growing resistance to the proprietary tide. Some people, like myself, are content with being paid once for doing work once and release the output of that work "freely" to the public (since they already paid for it to be created). Royalties you say? If I want more money, I just do more work. This eliminates "Piracy" (you can't "steal" what isn't created) and requires no DRM (I don't do the work until payment arrangements is made up front, often held in 3rd party escrow).
Within the current copyright futures market proprietary creations are made for free, then the creators gamble the future of their studios by trying to monetize copies that are in near infinite supply via artificial scarcity. Economics 101 says the price of copies should be zero regardless of cost to create or demand given an infinite supply. In the Information age what's scarce is not 1's and 0's. What's scarce is the ability to create new arrangements of bits. So, I simply monetize what is scarce: My labour. When the artificial scarcity is taken out of the equation it's easy to see that FLOSS or up-front crowdfunding are not really new methods of business; They're just like all other sane labour markets such as home builders, mechanics, etc. Negotiate a price up front for the work, do the work, get paid once, and do more work to make more money. Only one owner benefits from the building of a home or fixing of a car (1 to 1, work to benefit ratio), but information based works can benefit an entire culture (1 to many, work to benefit ratio); It's not a mere coincidence that the very technology which makes copies in near infinite supply also facilitates the new many to one direct payment systems which compliment the 1 to many work to benefit ratio. There is an issue of bootstrapping into a good reputation when first starting out, but a few smaller projects done for free or releasing a few projects under the existing artificial scarcity model can demonstrate capability.
When it comes to game development the work-for-pay model is not much different than working under a publisher. The dev still have to do more work to get more pay. Crowd sourced funding allows me to replace the publisher with consumers. This is GREAT because Publishers pay 3 to 5 times the cost of development in marketing. With crowdfunding I get free market research, advertising and publicity when I pitch to the consumers directly. I can ask for twice what I would get paid under a publisher and still create the game for cheaper than a publisher sells it to the public. When the work is complete all players who want to play can have the game for free -- It becomes free advertising for my next work. One issue that's slowly being resolved is that things like Kickstarter have gotten people used to the idea of devs only asking for a portion of what they need to earn on the project, which leaves them stuck charging for artificially scarce copies or failing to complete the project. I do my FLOSS based work in modular instalments when possible so the paying public can direct the course, or even contract a different dev for the remainder of the work if they don't like my output (a rare, but important feature few have yet adopted in big crowd-funding projects).
You would get laughed out of business if your plan was to sell ice to Eskimos during the Ice Age, but for some retarding reason most people don't think just as stupid for a business to sell bits to people with computers in the Information Age. This is the first generation growing up connected to a global information network, so there will be growing pains. Things are changing very fast. Adapt or become extinct. No amount of "piracy" can hurt me under the FLOSS / CC model since the more people using the product the better it is for me. How strange that the same old methods of labour monetization every other market uses would be ahead of the curve when compared to the "new and improved" copyright futures market.