Creative Commons and licenses and copyright

[Una Smith]

This is from www.ibiblio.org (where I maintain a small web site).

        Una

On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 04:32:32PM -0400, Paul Jones wrote:
>we're hosting Larry Lessig's new project, the Creative Commons
>http://www.creativecommons.org which will be officially open on May 16
>(Thursday).
>
>The idea is to provide licenses that allow sharing but that
>are also enforcable. they have developed logos and wording that will allow
>you to license your work or mark your work in ways that are more friendly
>for sharing than current copyright or simple public domain but fill some
>spaces in between. these options will include, non-commercial only,
>private use only, copyleft, attribution required, and the like.
>
>most all of the sites and works on ibiblio fit in these categories. some
>of you have been asking about licensing alternatives already. so after
>thursday. take a look.
>
>the New York Times reports:
>
>A New Direction for Intellectual Property
>Mon May 13, 2:54 PM ET
>
>By AMY HARMON The New York Times
>
>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 (news - web sites);
>and Eric Saltzman, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet
>and Society at Harvard Law School.

        Una Smith

Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS K-710, Los Alamos, NM  87545