Lessig starts "Creative Commons" group

[David Ascher]

This report from the O'Reilly conference, off of the NYT -- apologies if 
it's old bits;

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/technology/13FREE.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

A New Direction for Intellectual Property

By Amy Harmon

Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of 
law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit 
company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily 
designate their work as freely shareable.

Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this week at a 
technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has nearly a million 
dollars in start-up money. The firm's founders argue that the expansion 
of legal protection for intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending 
the term of copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and 
innovation. But the main focus of Creative Commons will be on clearly 
identifying the material that is meant to be shared. The idea is that 
making it easier to place material in the public domain will in itself 
encourage more people to do so.

The firm's first project is to design a set of licenses stating the 
terms under which a given work can be copied and used by others. 
Musicians who want to build an audience, for instance, might permit 
people to copy songs for noncommercial use. Graphic designers might 
allow unlimited copying of certain work as long as it is credited.

The goal is to make such licenses machine-readable, so that anyone could 
go to an Internet search engine and seek images or a genre of music, for 
example, that could be copied without legal entanglements.

"It's a way to mark the spaces people are allowed to walk on," said 
Lawrence Lessig, a leading intellectual property expert who will take a 
partial leave from Stanford Law School for the next three years to serve 
as the chairman of Creative Commons.

Inspired in part by the free-software movement, which has attracted 
thousands of computer programmers to contribute their work to the public 
domain, Creative Commons ultimately plans to create a "conservancy" for 
donations of valuable intellectual property whose owners might opt for a 
tax break rather than selling it into private hands.

The firm's board of directors includes James Boyle, an intellectual 
property professor at Duke Law School; Hal Abelson, a computer science 
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Eric 
Saltzman, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and 
Society at Harvard Law School.