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Non-Tech : Internet Rhetoric -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ~digs who wrote (22)	7/4/2004 5:40:30 PM
From: ~digs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 73

Creative Commons ; creativecommons.org -mission statement- "Some Rights Reserved": Building a Layer of Reasonable Copyright Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, 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 — to declare "some rights reserved." Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons' current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules. Creative Commons' first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works. Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity.

To: ~digs who wrote (22)	7/14/2004 12:32:21 AM
From: ~digs	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 73

week 5: internet communities theories about how communities form and behave on the Internet question to consider: -how do internet communities become integrated into our lives?

To: ~digs who wrote (22)	8/18/2004 11:05:38 PM
From: ~digs	Respond to of 73

--------- Lessig et al. Having an Impact --------- Ever so slightly, the efforts of Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons Project are indeed helping to shape a new public perception of intellectual property as it relates to the Internet. As of yet, their audience is not huge. Big media isn't listening. Non-Internet users certainly don't care. For the most part, even those that use the Internet avidly do not know enough about the issue for it to be particularly worrisome. However, the legal profession, academia, and politicians alike all have an acute ear to the ground. They are just now beginning to understand the ramifications of this new digital era. Because widespread Internet usage is relatively new, and because copyright law is inherently complex, it stands to reason that only a small segment of the population would initially be concerned with Digital Rights Management. Naturally, debate about a cutting edge issue is more likely to first be found in a scholarly journal, than to be heard around the family dinner table. But, when the public at large eventually finds out that its collective best interest is in jeopardy, they will immerse themselves fully into the debate. Lessig and those like him are doing their part to help shed some light on the subject. He states indiscriminantly: "For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. ...The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture." Admittedly, there is much apathy with regards to public policy in today's society. Copyright law may need to become even more corporate-centric before regular folk sit up and notice, but I should hope that the outrage they express upon realizing that their creative freedom has been thwarted is sufficient to make change. In closing, I must say that as easy as it is to become distressed when contemplating the current trend towards Internet protectionism, I am ultimately comforted by Lessig's truism: "The Internet is to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation."