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Creative Commons

On 21-Jul-05, at 2:58 PM, Sloan, Bernie referred to an article which asks:

"Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by
Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford?
In a nutshell: Creative Commons empowers authors by making it easy to
communicate the rights the author would like to make available to users. Different authors may have different desires for their works. For
example, academic authors are likely to always want attribution. People
who want to share their thoughts on politics may or may not have the same
perspective. An author may want to reserve commercial rights, make their
work available to the public domain, or make it available for commercial
use in developing countries only. Authors may wish to forbid or permit
derivatives of their work. Some people, particularly in the artistic
realm, are sharing their work as open content, to allow for collaboration. For example, a musician who wishes to share a portion of a piece of music
for others to build on, can indicate that derivates are fine. Authors can
indicate "share and share alike"; that is, go ahead and use the work, but
allows others to share as well.

One author may desire different rights for different works. For example,
I expect attribution for my academic works, but at some point in time I
can see myself sharing some of my photos (of flowers, scenery, etc.), as
open content, so that others can use them for artistic purposes if they
desired.

This may sound complicated, but it's not.

The author goes to a Creative Commons site, such as the Canadian one at
http://www.creativecommons.ca/ (there are Creative Commonses around the
world), clicks a menu of rights options, which produces a text message or
button for your web site. The user can click on the button to see which
options are allowed.

To see Creative Commons in action, check out my new blog, the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, at
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/

The button is on the right-hand side of the page, near the top.

cheers,

Heather Morrison

On 21-Jul-05, at 2:58 PM, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

"Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by
Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this
system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can
tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair
use" provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest
initiatives ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb.
Eye- rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing
fabulous new clothes."

More at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1838244,00.asp

Bernie Sloan
E-mail: bernies@uillinois.edu