All Hail Creative Commons
Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig plans a legal
insurrection
Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate Monday, February 11, 2002
Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig and a small band of
collaborators at MIT, Duke, Harvard and Villanova are about to embark on a
new endeavor that could help reignite the global high-tech economy.
A prolific thinker, writer and doer, and a national authority on
intellectual-property law and a former columnist at The Industry Standard,
Lessig is perhaps best known as the author of two of the most important
books yet produced about computers, the Internet and how our legal system
deals with them: "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," and his more recent
work, "The Future of Ideas."
In an interview last week, Lessig confirmed the basic details about
his latest venture, Creative Commons, which is slated to be formally
unveiled in a few months.
In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will
make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that
artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to
legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms
of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by
establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the
unprotected public domain.
The first set of licensing options Creative Commons plans to make
available are designed mostly for people looking for some protections as
they move their wares into the public domain. Those protections might
include requirements that the work not be altered, employed for commercial
purposes or used without proper attribution.
Lessig adds that it's possible Creative Commons' licenses may
eventually evolve to include options that permit or enable certain
commercial transactions. An artist might, for example, agree to give away a
work as long as no one is making money on it but include a provision
requiring payments on a sliding scale if it's sold. As participation in the
Commons project increases, a variety of specific intellectual-property
license options will evolve in response to user needs, which in turn would
create templates for others with similar requirements.
Within a few months, artists, writers and others will soon be able to
go online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made
license they can append to their works without having to pay a dime to a
lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase
similar legal services.
"We also want to facilitate machine-readable languages," adds Lessig,
who will be taking a partial leave from Stanford to help jump-start the
Creative Commons effort.
In Lessig's model, an MP3 song or a document or any other intellectual
property would contain a special machine-readable tag that specifies the
exact licensing terms approved by its creator. That means film students
making a movie, for example, could do a search, say, for jazz songs released
under public domain-friendly licenses that they can use for their soundtrack
without charge.
At the same time, Creative Commons also plans to build a "conservancy"
to facilitate the preservation and sharing of intellectual property.
A Win-Win Proposition
In one masterstroke, Lessig and colleagues will empower creators of
intellectual property by giving them more control over their work while also
increasing the communal technical resources that contribute to innovation
and growth. The result will be a new spark of life for the Internet, and for
the tech sector in general.
For the rest of the story go to:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/11/crea
tcom.DTL
