The Creative Commons Attribute ShakeAlike license says, in effect, that people can copy, remix, sample, fiddle with, and otherwise treat the BBS Documentary’s content as one might treat a piece of fabric in your home: in pretty much any way you want, to whatever ends, including commercial. The difference is the usual digital magic that you can make endless copies forever, but otherwise, it’s just another item in your home and on your computer that you own, basically. The rules are pretty simple: if you make something using it, you have to also allow people to use your something the same way, and you have to let people know you got it from Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary. Otherwise, go absolutely nuts, kids. Do things without fear of being sent to jail (and jail is a horrible place, believe me) and improve and build on the BBS Documentary so that it has a place in popular culture and education for years, maybe decades to come.

It is incumbent upon me to provide something worth buying, that is, the packaging is nice, the printing was professional, my research site and my story are easily found, and the process of ordering copies is painless and easy. If I fail you, if I have packaging that’s horrible or indifferent (think of so many “re-releases” of old albums), or a product that’s not worth buying (think of 90 percent of the crap in the world) or I make it so you have to sign away 3 children to buy a copy (think of “Click-through agreements” and “shrink-wrap licenses”), then I’m not really trying to attract your business, am I? I’m making your life a living hell in an attempt to make my life heaven. Why should you go the extra step to pay me?

I hope that the ordering page is easy to use and clear on what you get. I hope the website is informative, fun, and intruiging to browse. I hope that my own story of creating this work inspires people to pay me for it. But I realize this will not always be the case. I am not going to set the world on fire because of it. Respect flows both ways, and I get and recieve it in my mailbox on a daily basis now.

Now, here is one important misconception I have to address, related to all this, and which naturally shows up when people hear about the Creative Commons license.

Just because I have Creative Commons licensed this documentary does not mean I don’t like getting paid for it.

I hope that’s clear. What I’ve done is say “I’m not going to be a jerk-nut and threaten and insinuate and treat you like scum and tell you what you can and can’t do with the DVDs once you buy them.” In another way I’m saying “I realize that some people will not buy them and watch them anyway… oh well! I am happy they are seeing it. I hope they might still consider paying for it, but hope is what it is.”

I’ve seen people say “He wants us to torrent it, he wants us to copy it and give it away.” Well, no. I don’t want that; I want people to buy it and show it to whoever they want and blow a copy to a friend who wants to see one of the episodes but probably wouldn’t buy it anyway, or to take it to a friend’s house and play it for a dozen people. I want people to discuss the stuff in it, remember the good times with BBSes, generally think about that history and maybe consider writing down their own or making their own documentary. That’s what I want.

What I will get is going to range wildly, and that’s fine; people who will buy it, will buy it. (And thank you for doing so.) People who do not want to buy it will not buy it. It is, literately, out of my hands. I will not thrash and cry as if this is a new situation in the world.

I’ve cooked up my herbs and spices as I’ve listed above so that it’s something worth paying for. I didn’t just do the least amount of work necessary for it to be considered “not a total ripoff” and then market the living crap out of it to flim-flam people into paying good money for bad product. Believe me, I see a lot of stuff where that’s obviously what’s going on, and it’s why certain parts of the world are jaded and misanthropic about being made to pay for certain products.

In one of my world-famous metaphors, it’s like buying bread. You don’t feel ripped off buying bread; you don’t go “holy nails, why is this bread twenty dollars? In fact, it’s stale! It’s not even BREAD. It’s some sort of “best of bread” with a couple pieces of other loaves of bread stitched together!” Yet people feel this way about media and other products all the time. I’ve tried to make a decent, good, solid loaf of bread here, which tastes good, is what it says it is, and doesn’t cheat you.

So there we go, a long-winded essay indeed, but I hope it makes clear once and for all my feelings about all this. This is all an enormous risk I am taking, one being taken in the pursuit of a principle, and people have lost livelihoods and happiness pursuing principles. On the other hand, some people have become quite wealthy. I wouldn’t mind becoming wealthy, and maybe all this work I’ve done with this documentary will make me wealthy. But even if it doesn’t, I know that I achieved what I achieved without throwing my audience and customers into a meat grinder. And that’s a pretty good thing to know.