Lawrence Lessig has been a favourite of mine for a while now. His warnings about today's overly zealous culture of copyright protection, at the expense of rights and public good, are alarming. They're also very necessary. His warnings alone have been a great work for good in the world.
Fortunately for us all, he isn't stopping there. He recently became the Chair of Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
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. As their site notes:
Cultivating a New Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a non-profit organization founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.Giving License to Creativity: Our initial goal is to provide an easy way for people (like scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and authors--from world-renowned professionals to garage-based amateurs) to announce that their works are available for copying, modification, and redistribution. We are building a Web-based application for dedicating copyrighted works to the "public domain," and for generating flexible, generous licenses that permit copying and creative reuses of copyrighted works.
Shining a Spotlight on Sharing: We want to make it easy for people to find works that are in the public domain or licensed on generous terms. We are developing a method for labeling such works with metadata that identify their terms of use. Potential users could then search for works (say, photos of the Empire State Building) based on the permitted uses (say, noncommercial copying and redistribution).
Inspired in part by the free-software movement, 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.
Go, Lawrence, go! This is an enormously important effort, one that aims to preserve and nurture the very root of innovation that underlies the strength of our culture.
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