creative commons

Creative Commons

Today the Creative commons project got some coverage for launching a wiki. It is a place where anyone can add a case study for using their ground breaking copyright licenses. Most of the world probably doesn't even think about copyright too often, and we probably see that little c in a circle several times each day. What that little c in the circle means is 'this is mine, don't do anything with it." Perhaps we think of copyright as the battle between poor old recording companies trying to save their content from being illegally copied and distributed; a very easy feat by today's standards. It is because of this ease of copying and distribution that the Creative Commons project was formed. Not too many years ago, Lawrence Lessig asked the U.S. and the World, to take a close look at our copyright principles in the light of this new medium, computers. "Everytime we turn on a computer, we are making a copy of someones work; the code that makes the computer run", lessig often says. Every time we load a web page, we are making a copy of someone's content on our machine. Our copyright principles are still largely set in the times when it was much harder to make copies of works than clicking a button. Congress responded to Lessig's plea to consider reforming copyright with, "get creative".

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