Dear Colleagues,

Following my post on intellectual property rights, Peter Scupelli of
Carnegie Mellon University directed my attention to Lawrence
Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas. The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World. This book appeared just after I had wrapped up the
research on which my note was based. It looks like an important
contribution, and one that I will plan to read.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2001. The Future of Ideas. The Fate of the Commons
in a Connected World. New York: Random House.

Lawrence Lessig is a pioneer in cyberspace law and the different
legal issues affecting the knowledge economy. Those who wish to know
more about Lessig's many contributions should visit his web site at
URL:

http://lessig.org/

In my recent visit to the site, I learned about the new venture that
Lessig launched together with several colleagues. This is a project
designed to promote shared copyright and open use of intellectual
property under a variety of different plans. This, too, is new since
the article on copyleft mentioned in my note, and it offers an
important series of facilitating mechanisms for such ideas as the
shared copyright and anti-copyright plans created by the Fluxus
publishing ventures, or the more recent GNU licenses and copyleft
proposals.

To learn more, visit The Creative Commons at URL:

http://creativecommons.org/

The description posted below is copied from the Creative Commons Web site.

An interesting note also came from Glenn Johnson noting the
importance of intellectual property rights to leading edge design
firms. Over the years, I have noticed a number of interesting issues
in the way that design practitioners and design educators deal with
IP rights. In the early 1990s, I did some research on these themes. I
will look for my notes and restructure them for a post to PhD-Design.

As mentioned earlier, thoughts on the role of intellectual property
rights in design practice or design research are welcomed - along
with resources I may have missed.

Thanks to Peter Scupelli for the Lessig update.

Best regards,

Ken Friedman



Creative Commons

http://creativecommons.org/

"Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of
the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors
that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle,
Michael Carroll, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Molly Shaffer Van
Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal
Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert
Eric Saltzman, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

"Fellows and students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard Law School helped get the project off the ground. Creative
Commons is now housed at and receives generous support from Stanford
Law School, where Creative Commons shares space, staff, and
inspiration with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and
Society. The Board oversees a small administrative staff and
technical team, and is advised by a Technical Advisory Board.
Creative Commons is sustained by the contributions of a growing group
of supporters.

"Creative Commons's first project, in December 2002, was the release
of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking
inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General
Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web
application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the
public domain -- or retain their copyright while licensing them as
free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL,
Creative Commons licenses are not be designed for software, but
rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship,
music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to
build upon and complement the work of others who have created public
licenses for a variety of creative works.

"Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material
online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier.
To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to
associate creative works with their public domain or license status
in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use the
our search application and other online applications to find, for
example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original
photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed,
or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of
use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce
barriers to creativity.

"In 2003, Creative Commons will also work to build an 'intellectual
works conservancy.' Like a land trust or nature preserve, the
conservancy will protect works of special public value from
exclusionary private ownership. We will encourage people to donate
their copyrights to be held in public trust; in some cases, Creative
Commons may purchase important works to help guarantee both their
integrity and widespread availability. Our ultimate goal is to
develop a rich repository of high-quality works in a variety of
media, and to promote an ethos of sharing, public education, and
creative interactivity."