Creative Commons – a cool organization with an alternative model of copyright – held it’s first big fundraising event in San Francisco last night, and the room was buzzing with smart people and interesting ideas.
Biggest of course is the idea behind Creative Commons itself. The goal, essentially, is to protect intellectual property without completely locking it away - as current copyright law tends to do. Artists can decide how much to restrict the use of their creations – from quite restricted to quite open – by the type of license they choose. For example, you might allow people to download and even share your work, but they have to give you credit as the creator (such as posting “Photograph by” if they put a picture you took on their Web sites). Some licenses allow people to freely distribute your work as long as it’s kept in its original form, while others allow people to mix it into other creations (such as sampling music in a mash-up).
The first high-profile example was a CD that Wired magazine included with its November 2004 issue. Sixteen artists (including some biggies like the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, and Le Tigre) contributed songs that owners of the CD are free to rip, trade, and sample in other works.
Larry Lessig, the brains behind CC, spoke about where the organization is going in the future. For example:
One goal is to make open-access interoperable. Information in Wikipedia, for example, is free for public use, as is content from MIT’s OpenCourseWare. But the two sources have different legal structures. MIT uses a Creative Commons license, while some Wikipedia content is governed by other licenses. According to Lessig, it’s not currently possible to legally integrate material from those two sources into one offering, even though each source has the goal of providing open access. Lessig said that CC will be working on new legal structures to make different sources of free information work together. He shouldn’t have too much trouble working with Wikimedia, since it’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is now on the board of Creative Commons.
Google is joining in the effort (playing catch-up to Yahoo, which has long supported CC and even offered CC licensing for photos on its Flickr* Web site). In addition to a small monetary contribution, Google announced that it is now tagging all materials that have a CC license. So you can use its advanced search to find photos or other works that you are free to use. Personalities play a role here, too. Glenn Otis Brown, the former executive director of CC, is now at Google. And he made the announcement last night.
Also, CC is launching a for-profit division. How can you make money by giving stuff away? The same way television networks have for years: You include advertising. So for example, freely available videos might have a commercial tacked on to the end. The creator of the video doesn’t make money on sales, he or she makes money on people viewing the video and seeing the ad. So the more people download the video (for free), the more money the creator earns. (It’s like the click-through revenue model on Web sites).
Then some interesting things just popped up in cocktail conversation. One was a discussion between John Wilbanks of Creative Commons, and Dr. Chris Davis a chemist with Codexis who recently developed a gene that allows bacteria to cheaply produce the starting material for making the cholesterol-fighting drug Lipitor. They discussed the debate over whether a synthetic gene can be patented or copyrighted. It is a physical invention, which falls under patent protection, but it’s also a creative work – a string of code – that could possibly be copyrighted. Why does this matter? Copyright protection lasts far longer than patent restrictions. (For more, see Henry Foutain’s NewYork Times article from a few years ago about copyrighting DNA as music.)
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