NYTimes.com Article: A New Direction for Intellectual Property

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible interest to readers of this list.

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A New Direction for Intellectual Property

May 13, 2002
By AMY HARMON

Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of
law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit
company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily
designate their work as freely shareable.

Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this week at a
technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has nearly a million dollars
in start-up money. The firm's founders argue that the expansion of legal
protection for intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending the term
of copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and innovation. But the
main focus of Creative Commons will be on clearly identifying the material
that is meant to be shared. The idea is that making it easier to place
material in the public domain will in itself encourage more people to do
so.

The firm's first project is to 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. Graphic designers might allow unlimited copying of
certain work as long as it is credited.

The goal is to make such licenses machine-readable, so that anyone could
go to an Internet search engine and seek images or a genre of music, for
example, that could be copied without legal entanglements.

"It's a way to mark the spaces people are allowed to walk on," said
Lawrence Lessig, a leading intellectual property expert who will take a
partial leave from Stanford Law School for the next three years to serve
as the chairman of Creative Commons.

Inspired in part by the free-software movement, which has attracted
thousands of computer programmers to contribute their work to the public
domain, 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.

The firm's 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.  ��

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/technology/13FREE.html?ex=1022256910&ei=1&en=327e3e6d3d538e25

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