FC: "Creative Commons" copyright project debuts today

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

From: Donna Wentworth <donna () cyber law harvard edu>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Subject: CC Debuts
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 11:40:25 -0400

Hi Declan,

You may be inundated with email regarding the Creative Commons launch today
at O'Reilly, but I thought I'd send the below along, anyway, just in case.

The Berkman Center held the inaugural meeting of the Creative Commons on May
7, last year; people interested in the project are welcome to take a peek at
the meeting archive: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/creativecommons/>.

Regards,
Donna

**********************
May 16, 2002
SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA -

Representatives from the new nonprofit Creative
Commons (http://creativecommons.org) today outlined
the company's plans to help lower the legal barriers
to creativity through an innovative coupling of law
and technology. The Creative Commons will provide a
free set of tools to enable creators to share aspects
of their copyrighted works with the public. "Our tools
will make it easier for artists and authors to make some
or all of their rights available to the public for
free," Stanford Professor and Creative Commons
Chairman Lawrence Lessig explained at the O'Reilly Emerging
Technologies Conference. "If, for example, an artist
wants to make her music available for non-commercial use,
or with just attribution, our tools will help her
express those intentions in a 'machine-readable' form.
Computers will then be able to identify and understand
the terms of an author's license, making it easier
for people to search for and share creative works."

Creative Commons was formed by a coalition of
academics from a broad range of institutions, including
Duke, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Villanova. Its aim is
to use the flexibility of copyright law to help support
a rich public domain alongside traditional copyrights.

In a separate Creative Commons presentation, Molly Van
Houweling, Executive Director, and Lisa Rein, Technical
Architect, previewed the web-based application that will
help scholars, artists, and others make their works
available for copying, modification, and redistribution.
Authors and artists who use the tool may choose to dedicate
their works to the public domain or choose to retain their
copyright while allowing creative reuses subject to custom
combinations of conditions. An illustrator seeking exposure,
for example, might choose to let anyone freely copy and
distribute her work, provided that they give her proper
credit. An academic eager to build a public audience could
permit unlimited noncommercial copying of his writings.

"The aim," Ms. Van Houweling explained, "is not only to
increase the sum of raw source material online, but also
to make access to that material cheaper and easier." To
do this, Creative Commons will translate authors' intentions
into "metadata" associated with their creative works. This
will enable people to use the Internet to find, for example,
photographs that are free to be altered or reused, or texts
that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no
restrictions whatsoever - all by their authors' permission,
expressed in code as well as plain, straightforward
language.

Creative Commons expects to launch these applications for
general public use this fall. In the meantime, Creative
Commons is inviting feedback on its prototype and its
mission.

Creative Commons also announced its longer-term plans to
create an intellectual property conservancy. Like a land
trust or nature preserve, the conservancy will protect works
of special public value from exclusionary private ownership
and from obsolescence due to neglect or technological change.
The conservancy will house a rich repository of high-quality
works in a variety of media, and help foster an ethos of
sharing, public education, and creative interactivity.

More about Creative Commons:

Creative Commons was founded upon the idea that creativity
and innovation rely on a rich heritage of prior
intellectual endeavor. We stand on the shoulders of giants
by revisiting, reusing, and transforming the ideas and works
of our peers and predecessors. Digital communications promise
a new explosion of this kind of collaborative creative activity.
At the same time, expanding intellectual property protection
leaves fewer and fewer creative works in the "public domain" -
the body of creative material unfettered by law and, to
quote Justice Brandeis, "free as the air to common use" - while
the growing complexity of copyright makes it more and more
difficult to know when it is legal to copy or alter a work.
Creative Commons will work within the copyright system to
help reduce these barriers to creativity.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support
of the Center for the Public Domain.  It is now based at and
receives generous support from Stanford Law School, where
Creative Commons shares space, staff, and inspiration with
the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.  It
is led by a Board of Directors that includes law professors
Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and Michael Carroll, MIT
computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary
filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, and public
domain web publisher Eric Eldred. The organization is also
advised by a technical advisory board that includes boardmember
Hal Abelson, Barbara Fox (Senior Architect, Cryptography and
Digital Rights Management, Microsoft WebTV), Don McGovern
(Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
at Harvard Law School), and Eric Miller (Activity Lead for
the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Initiative).

Please direct press inquiries to Molly Van Houweling, Executive
Director, or Glenn Otis Brown, Assistant Director, at
press () creativecommons org.

**********************

..........
Donna Wentworth
Editor
The Filter <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filter>
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
Phone: (617) 495-0662
Fax:   (617) 495-7641
filter-editor () cyber law harvard edu
donna () cyber law harvard edu
 




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