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It's amazing sometimes what you read about when you're sitting on a crapper. I'm not sure if that's something that only men do - read on a crapper. I don't ever remember my mother taking a newspaper into the loo. At any rate, I happened to be thumbing through the March 2003 issue of Scientific American; you know, the one with the cover story on whether dinosaurs had feathers. I swear I have absolutely no idea how this magazine found its way to my bathroom. Maybe it flew. Amidst the issue's glossy high tech and allergy relief advertisements, I found a story about Creative Commons.org, a non-profit corporation based out of Stanford that includes some tip top public domainists and law school professors. Their goal is "to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules." Their message: Skip the intermediaries. This, coming from legal experts. Tres gauche! Through their website, CC plays administrator to the licensing of partial copyrights, whereby the creator of a work may select how their creation can be re-used - for credit or not, for commercial use or not, for derivative use or not. Applicable works include websites, music, films, photography, literature and courseware. How do they do it, you ask? Well, as they say, they've skipped the intermediaries. But what they've actually done is automated the intermediaries. Proof of this resides at the end of this article - the "Some Rights Reserved" icon that applies to this text, which may be reproduced for any purpose and may be altered so long as I get the credit for creating the original. All I did to proclaim these rights was go to their Licensing page, fill out an online form and boom - lawyer in a box. What good are they to the consumer? Well, without the assistance of Creative Commons.org, I would not have discovered CustomizedClassics.com, a service which customizes to your specifications classic pieces of literature that are in the public domain. I bought my own customized copy of Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Simon of Green Gables." Can you guess where I'm going to be reading it? |
