Today’s Guardian has an article on The Joneses on page three of the main paper!
See here (free subscription required, try bugmenot) :
[http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,2122751,00.html
](http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,2122751,00.html)It's a good article but the print version does get one thing wrong (since fixed in the online version):
_Because the content is tagged with a Creative Commons licence, allowing it to be freely re-edited for non-commercial use, the producers hope viewers will go one step further and re-edit and remix their own versions._
Gaaaaaah! Nooooo! For the love of Adam Smith! The Joneses is not NonCommercial! You can use it commercially under the Attribution-ShareAlike licence! This is not a bug, it is a core feature of the value of the project!
ShareAlike takes the internet “piracy” “problem” and turns it into a means of distribution, of content creation, and of new market identification. This works for The Joneses because from the point of view of the client The Joneses is a promotion, an advertisement. More copying, more modification to fit different audiences, and more unexpected distibution vectors and sites of consumption means reduced costs, increased reach, and better targeting.
NonCommercial would work against this. Noncommercial would make the project “sharecropping” and so reduce incentives for people to contribute to the project. And it would render some opportunities to distribute the project illegal or doubtful.
This is a major point but The Joneses turns so much current media industry wisdom on its head that it is not surprising that it’s difficult to understand. It’s frustrating to be working against the idea that NonCommercial is “The Creative Commons License”(sic), but it’s great to have got to the stage where there is something out there to be working against it with.
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