luis, thank you for replying to my post, although I think you might be inflating the relevance of creative commons and Lessig’s work to what it means to be prepared for IP business. Progress in business occurs through activities that get you closer to shipping to paying customers. Open source and creative commons are definitely beneficial to business in many ways. PHP, for example, is one of the greatest things ever created. Nevertheless, these matters are not central to business planning for most companies.

Although the Science Commons project is interesting, it does appear to be concerned more with the standards of intellectual property within the academic research community than with providing means to share educational content, and I am not aware of a major educational publishing company that takes this type of approach with its content, although if it were to become standard, that would have many benefits for human development. It would sure make Wikipedia a lot better.

In my company, we would like teachers and students to feel free to produce derivative works. We don’t have a problem with people downloading, sharing, producing, etc, as they are not trying to make a profit off our labor. We made our works because we want the world to change. Basically, the more people who learn science the better.

As I said, Creative Commons gives us a way to do what we were going to do anyway. It gives us an easy way to handle the legalese and an easy way to represent the decision as a marketing feature, so I am happy to learn about it.

Though I don’t feel like I was lost and now am found.

And I still sustain my point that the talk about “threatening fair use” is complete hooey. Why worry about Lawrence Lessig when we already have the SCO vs. Linux circus?

Sure, he’s technically correct, but that statement is a lot like saying that steering wheels do nothing that “ordinary automobile controls” do not already do.

It would be one thing if he were merely clarifying how CC licenses fit into the copyright system for readers who aren’t familiar with the details of how it works, but in context it just betrays an incredible level of ignorance (feigned or otherwise) on his part.

You and I can see that the benefit of CC licenses is more or less about standardisation, why can’t he?

the problem is not that he isn’t seeing the point, he maliciously does not want to see the point of CC or anything that eases large-scale content production

Still, I am trying to cultivate a non-aggressive attitude to blogging, so if I’ve been too charitable to Dvorak, I’m not going to apologise.

This is because the creative commons documents are entirely contained within the present copyright system.

I’m perhaps not being clear…

When you write something, you have copyright. That copyright gives you ALL rights of distribution, etc, except for those considered fair use. You may, however, choose to surrender these rights.

Creative commons is just a formalized designation of which rights (out of the whole which you own) you are surrendering.

You could already surrender that set of rights voluntarily, without the creative commons tag. The creative commons tag just signifies which rights you are surrendering, and provides a link to the written document explaining this.

The alleged benefit is the same as you get with any form contract. If lots of people use the same form, people can become familiar with it, and the need to write a new form every time you make a new contract is avoided. That’s all creative commons does.

That, and provide a signifier for people who like to “fight the man.” But that’s more a sociological point.

wetzel: you need to look into the Science Commons project ASAP. Also, stop everything else you are doing and purchase and read everything Lessig has ever written. I’m only slightly joking- if you’re trying to get into an IP-related business, but haven’t read Lessig and/or understood Creative Commons, then (frankly) you’re woefully under-aware of some of the major trends across every IP-related industry.

The funny thing about Dvorak is that if he bothered to actually read Lessig or the CC site properly, he’d realise he and Lessig are actually on the same side here regarding protecting both fair use and author’s rights.

I think this would go against the 1000 year tradition in common law that students have no rights whatsoever.

By the way, John, I am very grateful that you made this post. I did not know about creativecommons.org.

I’ve been working for years on a project for high school and undergraduate science education, which will be launching as a business soon, and creative commons gives me a clear, understandable way to communicate my intellectual property position. It will save me a lot of lawyering.

Would it be reasonable for students to release their papers under attribution-noncommecial-sharealike licenses in the academy? Is there something about the mentor-mentee relationship that this would complicate?

Thoughts?