If you’ve never seen Larry Lessig talk about free culture, copyright, and Creative Commons you’re missing out. According to Lessig himself, he gave his last lecture on free culture on January 31st at Stanford University. Watch it.
Tag Archives: creative commons
Reclaiming fair use
I’m a huge Creative Commons advocate, and I use a CC license on pretty much everything I publish online. As much as I love the Commons, I think it’s important to remember (and teach) that we’re not without some rights when it comes to traditionally licensed works. (Here’s where I insert my note that Creative Commons licensed works are not copyright-free, they’re simply licensed under relatively permissive licenses in contrast with most commercially produced works.)
I found a couple great resources recently that I’m looking forward to sharing with people in my school district. The first from the Center for Social Media called Recut, Reframe, Recycle focuses on the use of copyrighted materials in online videos and argues that many of them could be legal. The authors include a list of 45 videos in nine fair use-protected categories. Believe it or not, there are shades of grey here. We shouldn’t automatically reject student work that utilizes copyrighted works.
The second piece is a video I found at the Stanford Law School by Bucknell University Professor Eric Faden entitled A Fair(y) Use Tale. Professor Faden thumbs his nose at The Mouse brilliantly by remixing clips from Disney movies to teach about copyright and fair use.
I’m adding these resources to my copyright and fair use arsenal. I hope someone else will find them useful too.
Supporting Creative Commons
If you share my belief that Creative Commons is fighting the good fight for a sensible approach on intellectual property and copyright issues, please take a minute to click the button on this page and give “$5 for the Commons.” If you can afford more than $5, then you may want to visit the 2005 Fundraising Campaign page.
See the About Us page at Creative Commons for more information. Here’s a quote that explains the Creative Commons mission:
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.
Technorati Tags: creative commons |
Creative Commons presentation
We had a brief presentation by Neeru Paharia from the Creative Commons organization tonight. She had a video explaining the history of Creative Commons and went on to talk about some specific Web resources to help users find Creative Commons-licensed content. Her suggestions:
- Yahoo! Creative Commons Search for all manner of digital content
- Flickr for images
- Soundclick for music
- Prelinger Archives for video footage (and other goodies)
She also highlighted two Creative Commons tools. The first, ccPublisher, helps users tag content with the proper Creative Commons license and then uploads the content to the Internet Archive. The second, ccMixter, is a tool to build a music sharing site that can be linked to other ccMixter sites on the Internet. She talked about the potential for building a ccMixter for teacher lesson plans.
I haven’t mentioned this yet in my musing about developing our curriculum sharing tool, but I plan to lobby our district administration to license all of the curriculum materials with a Creative Commons license by default. Shouldn’t sharing be the default anyway?
Introducing Creative Commons
It’s clear that some people don’t quite get Creative Commons yet. See Lawrence Lessig’s recent post about an article in Billboard magazine for proof that there’s more education to be done. (Assuming that the misunderstanding is an honest one and not motivated by blind allegiance to the RIAA.)
Creative Commons AU has produced a short animated video [link, 13.3 MB] that captures the essentials of Creative Commons licensing. Maybe you or someone you know could benefit from getting a better sense of how Creative Commons works and how it can be used to promote sharing and collaboration.
Podcast roundup
I’ve linked to portions of podcasts before, but I’m going to recommend that everyone listen to these presentations in their entirety.
Dan Gillmor spoke at last year’s Accelerating Change conference and described some of the changes that the democratization of media has brought to our culture. The podcast of his session, We, the Media, is a great primer on the topic from someone who knows what he’s talking about.
In the category of copyright and intellectual property Lawrence Lessig’s The Comedy of the Commons and Cory Doctorow’s talk at the Web 2.0 conference are great starting points to understand how copyright and intellectual property law have been twisted in recent years to the detriment of the public good. (Did I give away my bias? Oops.)
These are huge issues that affect every one of us.