Audience v. artist: Write the

Audience v. artist
: Write the Web interviews Noah Grey, the creator of Greymatter (the predecessor to Movable Type), who runs a photo site. He made Greymatter open but he owns his photos and doesn’t want to see them stolen, so they asked him about the current copyright contretemps:

I’m mystified and slightly angered by the growing feeling among many on the web that the rights of artists over their own work just aren’t important (or are at least of equal importance to the user’s desire to do whatever they want with it). I think I understand and appreciate the value of openness as well as anyone – Greymatter is one of the most well-known opensource programs in the world, after all (and in fact I’ve now put it under a Creative Commons license).

The ethic of openness and sharing is a great one, but somehow that got mutated in a lot of people’s minds into the idea that it should be the users deciding what’s open, and not the artists.

[via Industrial Technology & Witchcraft]