Creative Commons plus

I heard Lawrence Lessig speak in Minneapolis last spring at a Media Reform Conference sponsored by FreePress.net. He was an amazing speaker. His was no "death by power point" presentation. His talk, both verbally and on the screen behind him, moved very fast and was original and thought provoking. He was there to speak about his "Change Congress" project. From Wikipedia I learned that he hoped that, through the Change Congress project, voters would be able to hold their representatives in government accountable. He's concerned with corruption in politics and the influence of money on politics. To me, this seemed like a good - using the-web-to-inform-and-empower-the-people - type project.

Then I came across him again in our textbook which mentioned him in connection with the Creative Commons. I googled that site and watched a short video with people talking about what Creative Commons means, interspersed with photographs and other artwork that use the Creative Commons' new copyright license. Some of the phrases I caught from the video were - "shared culture," helps with the "Can I use that photo?" question, "a new type of folk culture," "people want to share stuff," "here's the things you're allowed to do," "the law gets in the way when creators want to share." From this site, I learned that the Creative Commons gives people tools to make a choice about copyright. The way it was before Creative Commons was - commercial use or not commercial use. "Creative Commons gives you the right to exercise your copyright in more ways, more simply." So you can still own the copyright to your work, and you can still get all the royalties for the use of your work, but you can also choose to share your work freely while still owning the copyright, if you want that. And there are choices in between and beyond these.

On the Creative Commons website, they say that they set creative works free for certain uses. "Our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them." They provide a "some rights reserved" type of copyright, a spectrum of possibilities rather than just the "all rights reserved" versus public domain type of copyright most people are familiar with. Creative Commons is part of the free software and open-source movements.

Then I went to Lawrence Lessig's blog. In a December 2, 2008 post titled open-government.us, Lessig said he was encouraged by the decision that the Obama transition team made to freely license change.gov. Lessig and others are now coming up with "open government principles," such as "Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities." In an earlier blog dated December 1, 2008, Lessig talks about how "the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov (which isn't actually a .gov entity so is not exempt from the rights of copyright) to embrace the freest" Creative Commons license. (Lessig also has a campaign going to try to get UTube to support the Creative Commons by letting people pick a license for the work they upload.)

Then, on December 5, 2008 on CommonDreams.org, I read an article by Amy Harder in The National Journal reporting that Lessig, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and MoveOn.org are applauding Obama's stated commitment to open government. This article announced the website where the above coalition released the three prinicples stated in Lessig's blog post. A day earlier, the Obama transition team had already agreed to the first principle "that its Web site, change.gov will implement a new copyright policy - the Creative Commons License - that allows for more widespread use of its content." The article further quoted Lessig saying, "Nobody knows exactly the best way to do this right now... So that calls for this kind of ongoing discussion, both inside and outside of the administration."

Blogs and the internet are fostering this type of discussion between citizens and government in an exciting new way that will be interesting to watch. It's exciting that this new administration is even in on this kind of discussion. And Lessig and his blog are pushing this envelope. I think I'll bookmark him.