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When Lawrence Lessig visited Dublin, Ireland, he railed against the overly zealous culture of copyright protection. Now he's taking the fight into the Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
Lessig will unveil Creative Commons this week in Santa Clara, California. It's backed by nearly a million dollars in start-up money. He will also sign his latest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, in which he argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on behalf of Establishment players -- and stifle innovation.
We need a Creative Commons because legal protection has overexpanded for intellectual property. Things like the 1998 copyright law, extending the term of copyright by 20 years, will inhibit creativity and innovation. We also need Creative Commons to help identify material that is meant to be shared. If you make it easy to place material in the public domain, more people will share their stuff.
Count me in as someone interested in Creative Commons licensing. This project will design a set of licenses stating the terms under which a given work can be copied and used by others. Musicians who want to build an audience, for instance, might permit people to copy songs for noncommercial use. I work with graphic designers who would allow unlimited copying of certain work as long, as long as they get a credit for the work.
I have seen work at www.picsearch.com from photographers, journalists, and graphics artists who have gone through courses I've taught. They would benefit if licensing was machine-readable, enabling anyone to use an internet search engine to find legally reusable images or music clips.
Professor Lessig describes this process as "a way to mark the spaces people are allowed to walk on." This sounds like the Open Source movement. Creative Commons ultimately plans to create a "conservancy" for donations of valuable intellectual property whose owners might opt for a tax break rather than selling it into private hands.
Besides Professor Lessig, the Creative Commons' board of directors includes James Boyle, an intellectual property professor at Duke Law School; Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Eric Saltzman, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
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