let me hear your voice tonight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai) wrote2015-06-04 02:23 pm
alexseanchai) wrote2015-06-04 02:23 pm
Entry tags:
don't worry, I've no plans to die, but planning ahead is always good
John Scalzi on creative folks' estate planning. Gist is, if you have intellectual property, you need to do estate planning.
I am broke and lazy at the moment, so lawyering up is not much of an option. And I suspect the following paragraphs, being not lawyered up or witnessed, are not going to hold much legal force. But I want to state my intentions anyway:
Upon my death, I want all my published work that is not already licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (or CC0, because I know I've put a few things out there CC0) to acquire the latest CC BY-SA license. This is, if legally allowed, explicitly to include any elements in which I can assert a copyright of any fanworks I have published. Same goes for anything I create that is first published after my death: publish it CC BY-SA or not at all. If any of my creative work generates a posthumous income for my estate, I want that income divided in equal thirds between Creative Commons, Hellenion, and Oregon State University: see next paragraph.
I want to set up a scholarship through the OSU Queer Studies department. I am tempted to dub it the Alex Conall Fuck Misgendering Award—I believe it wassilveradept who came up with that phrasing but I can't remember for certain sure—but that may not be professional. The idea is to give money, no strings attached, to a nonbinary and/or genderqueer student of Oregon State University. 'Cause CollegeBoard and all them scholarship search places I've ever encountered require one to assert a binary gender, and fuck that. I also want to give funding to the OSU Queer Studies department, full stop and no strings attached. I am not sure which of these two I want more. So if I die, somebody flag down the then-current Queer Studies head, tell them here are two choices please pick the one you like better, and point them at whoever's in charge of handling my estate.
The thing about Creative Commons commercial licenses, though? Income from my creative work does not necessarily flow to me. It's always excellent when Badr's use of Adebowale's CC-licensed work produces income for Adebowale, but Cahaya can use Adebowale's CC-licensed work and produce income for no one but Cahaya, and if Adebowale has a problem with that then they shouldn't have used that CC license in the first place. So I am explicitly offering all y'all the opportunity, once I am an ex-parrot, to republish and remix my CC BY-SA work to profit yourselves. Any money that goes to my estate from your efforts is lagniappe. (While I'm alive, of course, I will be much happier if your efforts involving my work profit me too! But like I just said, I'm not allowed to have a problem if your efforts involving my work do not benefit me at all.)
I have epic massive problems with "intellectual property" as a concept, or at least with the current application of the concept. It pisses me the fuck off that the only way to keep my work legally available after my death is to bequeath the copyright to someone. So. Here. Merry Genesios, or possibly Anthesteria. I bequeath all my copyrights to all of you.
I am broke and lazy at the moment, so lawyering up is not much of an option. And I suspect the following paragraphs, being not lawyered up or witnessed, are not going to hold much legal force. But I want to state my intentions anyway:
Upon my death, I want all my published work that is not already licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (or CC0, because I know I've put a few things out there CC0) to acquire the latest CC BY-SA license. This is, if legally allowed, explicitly to include any elements in which I can assert a copyright of any fanworks I have published. Same goes for anything I create that is first published after my death: publish it CC BY-SA or not at all. If any of my creative work generates a posthumous income for my estate, I want that income divided in equal thirds between Creative Commons, Hellenion, and Oregon State University: see next paragraph.
I want to set up a scholarship through the OSU Queer Studies department. I am tempted to dub it the Alex Conall Fuck Misgendering Award—I believe it was
silveradept who came up with that phrasing but I can't remember for certain sure—but that may not be professional. The idea is to give money, no strings attached, to a nonbinary and/or genderqueer student of Oregon State University. 'Cause CollegeBoard and all them scholarship search places I've ever encountered require one to assert a binary gender, and fuck that. I also want to give funding to the OSU Queer Studies department, full stop and no strings attached. I am not sure which of these two I want more. So if I die, somebody flag down the then-current Queer Studies head, tell them here are two choices please pick the one you like better, and point them at whoever's in charge of handling my estate.The thing about Creative Commons commercial licenses, though? Income from my creative work does not necessarily flow to me. It's always excellent when Badr's use of Adebowale's CC-licensed work produces income for Adebowale, but Cahaya can use Adebowale's CC-licensed work and produce income for no one but Cahaya, and if Adebowale has a problem with that then they shouldn't have used that CC license in the first place. So I am explicitly offering all y'all the opportunity, once I am an ex-parrot, to republish and remix my CC BY-SA work to profit yourselves. Any money that goes to my estate from your efforts is lagniappe. (While I'm alive, of course, I will be much happier if your efforts involving my work profit me too! But like I just said, I'm not allowed to have a problem if your efforts involving my work do not benefit me at all.)
I have epic massive problems with "intellectual property" as a concept, or at least with the current application of the concept. It pisses me the fuck off that the only way to keep my work legally available after my death is to bequeath the copyright to someone. So. Here. Merry Genesios, or possibly Anthesteria. I bequeath all my copyrights to all of you.