Tuesday, January 28, 2003

Kevin Marks sends along another cool alternative to the current IP quagmire: http://www.mediagora.com/.  Very intriguing. I should also note another piece on alternatives to IP, which may have been updated since. 5:16:13 PM

The winners in the Eldred decision are obviously primarily those companies that hold lots of valuable copyrights -- rights which retain their value over long periods of time, and which may well continue increase in value as Web proliferation continues throughout the globe.  Other less obvious winners, though, might be some of the alternative ideas to the traditional copyright system.  One such alternative is Creative Commons, (school of full disclosure: has roots in the Berkman Center) which seems to be gaining steam since its launch last month.  To the extent that the formal US copyright system, or its international analogues, doesn't give content creators the options that they need, Creative Commons fills that void.  They need more people to know about what they're doing, but I know the team is hard at work making the various forms of (cc) a viable alternative to (c).  Another alternative is the work that Prof. Terry Fisher of Harvard Law School, and chairman of the Berkman Center (school of full disclosure: as such, he's my boss!), has been developing in his forthcoming book.  He's posted the core of his argument to his Web site, which makes for excellent reading.  The gist of his argument -- like Creative Commons, it's gaining mind-share -- is that there are a series of alternative ways to think about copyright laws and business models and at least one of them seems to make sense ("an administrative compensation system," his chapter 6).  I'll let you read it for yourself, but it's beginning to make a lot of sense to me, and to others. 12:25:49 PM

© Copyright 2003 John Palfrey.