[wordup] creative commons launch ...

[Adam Shand]

This is really really cool stuff.  Good for them and lets hope only good 
things come.

Adam.

From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2003/01/03/cc.html

Returning Creativity to the Commons
by Richard Koman
01/03/2003

It was Eldred reunion night Dec. 16 at the SomArts performance space in 
San Francisco's South of Market district to celebrate the rollout of 
Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons organization. There was Net radical 
John Gilmore furtively handing out little LED key-chain lights in an 
array of colors--of course, John wasn't at the Eldred hearing because he 
only flies anonymously, which is to say he doesn't fly at all. EFF 
provacateur Cory Doctorow was there sporting a slimmer frame courtesy of 
the Atkins diet and a new EFF bumpersticker. Creative Commons' XML maven 
Lisa Rein was buzzing excitedly about the outlook for the Elcomsoft 
trial (they were acquitted the next day). And there was Brewster Kahle 
and the Internet Bookmobile, parked right on the floor of the space, 
just below a trippy computer projection slide show and not too far from 
the grilled eggplant and hummus table, handing out yet more copies of 
Alice in Wonderland, made on the spot thanks to the amazing desktop 
binding machine. Oh, and Eric Eldred himself was there, unassuming in a 
Red Sox baseball cap.

When the program itself started, Eldred attorney Lawrence Lessig took 
the stage and did what he does so well in his public speeches--boiling 
complex issues down to their essence, sometimes a one- or two-word 
essence. This boiling down is underlined by his slides, writing large 
the juxtaposition of two opposing themes. He starts with a story of his 
father complaining about someone who owes him money and the young Larry 
innocently asks, "Dad, why don't you sue him?" The elder Lessig gives a 
stern look and tells his son, "Son, in this world there are those who 
do"; cues a black slide with the Courier-set word "do"; "and those who 
sue"; cue the "sue" slide. "Those who tear down and those who build"; 
cue the "build" slide.

As the attorney on the Eldred case, Lessig is, of course, pursuing the 
sue option. But even in the event of full-bore victory for the Eldred 
forces, the copyright issue will not be fixed. Now Lessig is building 
something more: a system of projects that taken together will enable 
creators to give their works to the public domain, or to limit the terms 
of their copyright protection, or to retain certain rights and give up 
others. What is being built may reflect the nuances of all of human 
creation, it may reflect the sometimes low-cost nature of creating and 
distributing on the Net as opposed to creating things that cost 
thousands or millions of dollars to display.

The genesis for Creative Commons came from Eldred himself, who told 
Lessig in an early meeting on the case that he didn't even care if they 
won the case; "what I care about," Lessig reports Eldred saying, "is 
that we build something that increases the public domain." That's 
Creative Commons, a series of projects designed to increase the amount 
of "stuff available to others."

Creative Commons is trying to build, or rebuild, the enabling of the 
public domain. It starts with two efforts, both of which allow creators 
to say, "I want to be compensated (perhaps financially or perhaps just 
with credit) for my work, and I want to enrich the public domain with my 
works." These two efforts are:

* The Creative Commons license, which includes "legal code" (assuring 
creators that the rights they assert will be legally protected), a 
"commons deed," (a simple statement of which rights are asserted and 
which are ceded, which anyone can understand), and "machine-readable 
code," (some metadata in the form of RDF, so that computer programs can 
understand the terms of the work.)

* The Founders Copyright, under which publishers and creators agree to 
limit their copyright protections to 14 years, renewable to 28 years. 
(O'Reilly & Associates has pledged to convert some 200 works to Founders 
Copyright within the next month.)

Copyright Gone Wrong

Why do we need these initiatives? What's wrong with the copyright system 
we've had for over two centuries? In fact, copyright today could not 
look more different than it did when the Constitution was drafted in 
1790, with the specification that copyright be for a term of "limited" 
duration. Today, in the age of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension 
Act, copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. What 
is the meaning of the term "limited" when Congress has extended 
copyright so many times, made it so long? This is the crux of the Eldred 
case: Lessig says the term is rendered meaningless, while MPAA lobbyist 
Jack Valenti (and the U.S. Attorney General, and Congress) says: 
"Limited means whatever Congress says it means."

In so many words, the current law says that creators (or the 
corporations to whom they assign their rights) should control their 
works for a very long time. Long after an author's death, profits should 
continue to flow to his or her heirs. The public should not be able to 
copy, expand, alter, or make art out of the works even after the 
author's grandchildren are dead. Which side of this case do you think 
the heirs of Dr. Seuss are on?

The framers of the Constitution had a different idea: that people have 
the right to collect for their creations, but after a set amount of time 
those creations go into the public domain. The time specified was 14 
years, renewable for another 14 years. After 28 years, there are no more 
extensions--even if the work is still filling your bank account. The 
framers wanted to enable the public domain.

In the old days, your work was not copyrighted unless you explicitly 
made a copyright claim; if you wanted to extend your copyright for 
another 14 years you had to file for that extension. By default, work 
was entered in the public domain unless the creator took steps to 
(temporarily) remove it. The law today says everything you create you 
can copyright automatically. "The copyright system has a default of no 
with regard to all creative work," Lessig told me earlier the day of the 
event.

The Constitution envisions a world in which intellectual property and a 
public commons are kept in balance. It rewards entrepreneurial 
initiative and seeks to compensate artists and inventors for the time, 
money, and talent it takes to create, build, market, and distribute a 
work or a product. It also claims for Americans a rich public domain.
Intellectual Recycling

Lessig talks about creative works having two lives. First, there is the 
private, commercial life, during which money is charged and, perhaps, 
profits are made. Then there is a second life, a noncommercial life, 
when the work is turned over to the public domain. It's not a new idea; 
surely this was the framers' vision.

"Think of it as recycling," Tim O'Reilly tells me after the 
presentations, while technical difficulties delayed DJ Spooky's 
real-time remixing of Birth of a Nation. "It's a code of conduct for the 
digital age: recycle stuff when you're done with it .... Keeping under 
copyright something that no longer has value is like keeping all your 
old newspapers .... It's about small opportunities. You never know what 
people will do with something you're not using."

And how do we guarantee that once things enter the public domain, they 
will remain available? Internet archivist Brewster Kahle took the stage 
with his son Caslon to make this offer: The Internet Archive will 
provide unlimited storage and bandwidth--forever--for all video and 
audio media made available as Creative Commons-licensed or public domain 
content.

So is O'Reilly endangering his business by committing to the Founders' 
Copyright? "No. As a computer book publisher, 28 years is far longer the 
life of any title. It's not a very hard choice when it comes down to it, 
although I might feel differently if I were a fiction publisher. As a 
publisher of useful works, all I have to do is keep updating it. If the 
first edition enters the public domain in 14 years, I'm probably on the 
fourth or fifth edition by that time. An example is our X books. People 
have asked for those over the years but it no longer makes financial 
sense for us to publish them. Someone could take those books and put 
them in a Linux distribution, for example.

O'Reilly recalls a book he wrote about Frank Herbert back in 1978, which 
has been long out of print. When a few people asked for a copy of it, he 
contacted the publisher but got no response. "I decided to break the law 
and put it on the Web, under the theory that they'd probably never find 
out about it and if they did it would be a wake-up call. So, one of the 
exciting things about Creative Commons is that it makes things explicit 
up front.

"We have an obligation to make a statement," O'Reilly says, while 
conceding that his decision will likely have little impact on the 
general publishing industry. "It may tip our competitors to start 
thinking about it. It may matter more to computer geeks."

O'Reilly is not only releasing out-of-print books, he has made a 
commitment to publishing all future titles under the Founders' 
Copyright. The final list of titles should be released within a month.
The Third Way

As part of his presentation, Lessig shows two videos from two well-known 
figures. First, John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and well-known 
radical Internet thinker: "Creative Commons, by setting up a conservancy 
of the middle, is increasing the right to know. As a species, we will 
get away from thought as something to own .... You are assuring that our 
grandchildren will have access to information, that it won't die in the 
clutches of institutions trying to clutch it to their breasts."

And then ... Jack Valenti himself, smiling graciously, apologizing for 
not being at the event in person, nattering on about how he's debated 
Lessig three times, supposedly to the chagrin of his friends who 
demanded to know why he was debating "the most brilliant lawyer in 
America," telling him these appearances do not make him look intelligent 
by association but simply make him look like an "ass."

"Larry makes it clear that he is supportive of copyright, and I agree 
that people may want to give up part or all of their copyright 
protection .... Creative Commons strikes a marvelous balance between 
copyright protection and copyright material that people want to make 
available," Valenti says on the video.

Quickly dismissing Valenti's "bullshit" about his brilliance, Lessig is 
nonetheless beaming. He claims the evening is the first time Barlow and 
Valenti have been in agreement on anything. "Both permit us this middle 
place."

"We adopt this strategy now because there's an urgency to this debate, 
an urgency when the laws want to turn anyone who shares into a criminal. 
Our tradition is one where we share our culture. We start with Valenti 
and Barlow expressing agreement on an ideal to build something 
different. Our tradition is freedom, not control; creativity is built on 
top of freedom, not control.

"The ideology of control must end now."

So, where's all the CC-licensed content? Part of the Creative Commons 
site is devoted to highlighting some of the works and Web sites that 
have signed on to the CC license. Most notable is a huge amount of 
material from Byrds leader Roger McGuinn (the works, not his 
recordings). Ultimately, however, Creative Commons has no intention of 
maintaining a full database of all licensed materials. Look for tools in 
the future that will enable search engines to access license information 
and for Web sites to identify the licensing of given works.

Roll Your Own License

The Creative Commons license lets you specify that your work can be 
freely copied with any or none of several restrictions. To create a 
license, visit the Creative Commons site and answer these three questions:

     * Do you want to require attribution?
     * Do you want to allow commercial uses?
     * Do you want to allow derivative works?

Based on these choices, Creative Commons' software pulls up the 
appropriate license and provides an image and text that you can place on 
a Web site or include in printed material. You can post the commons deed 
(a simple statement of license) on your Web site and link to the legal 
document. Creative Commons also provides code for you to link to their 
RDF for your license. Creative Common's RDF includes the following:

     * title
     * description
     * subject
     * publisher
     * creator
     * contributor
     * rights
     * date
     * format
     * type
     * source, derivative work
     * license

As long as this information is linked from your document, other 
computers (with RDF-reading ability) accessing the document will know 
the rights and permissions. This is crucial as the Web moves from the 
computer-to-human paradigm to the computer-to-computer paradigm.

What's next? Look for the ability to add more metadata to your 
creations, and the integration of Creative Commons metadata into search 
engines like Google.

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