Copyright organization Creative Commons has put together a highly-enjoyable movie/presentation (warning: don’t try without broadband) about their first year of existence, and it’s well worth viewing. The idea behind the organization is to provide a legal framework to allow people to create things and distribute them not with all rights reserved, but some rights reserved. Like this blog. There’s an icon on the lower left-hand side of this page that indicates that my writings here are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license, meaning that anybody who wants to may copy, distribute, display, and perform this work, and they may even make commercial use of this work, provided that they credit me and do not change it. I figure that if anything that I write here is useful to anybody, that’s great.
People tend to think that their thoughts are so great and exciting and original that they couldn’t possibly ever let anybody else use them. So they hold their ideas tightly to their chest, where they never do anybody any good. Creative Commons tells people that the world functions best when we share what we know. Lawyers know and rely on this. Any musician that does any remixing well knows this. The world of science is completely dependent on this concept. We learn best — we advance best — when we share.
Over one million original works are now available under a Creative Commons license (they offer a few different licenses more and less liberal than the one that I choose to use on this particular website). Not just writing, but music, and movies, and art. Copyright is completely out of control in this country. It’s time to take it back.