« Skype Me, Skype You! | Home | Who Are They Joking With? »
Creative Communists? No, but …
… Creative Commonists! Who are they? A group of developers and academics who are known for working on copyright reform under the project Creative Commons. Nowadays, when appetites for putting a license on just anything that exists is growing day by day, it is quite useful to come across some actors who try to slow and calm down the intellectual property advocates a bit.
On the continuum of creative control we are very much used to copyright and a bit less so to copyleft. Whereas a copyright grants its holder the sole legal right to their original works, a copyleft tries to ensure that every person who receives a copy of an original work, can use, modify and re-distribute the work. So, basically the Creative Commons can be put in the middle of this continuum. They try to ensure creators to enjoy their freedom and at the same time prevent them from various exploitations. To quote them:
“We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
I checked thru their web page and database and I must admit I was surprised. One can search for music, sounds, movies, photos, books and essays and also lesson plans, course packets and similar stuff. Of course one can also upload any of these for others to use. I found especially useful MIT OpenCourseWare, which is a free open educational resource for faculty, students and whoever might be interested. And good news: no registration required. I could go on and on …. but instead I ll encourage you to take a look and who knows, you might just find something interesting for yourself. Then digging a bit further, on Images section of Creatie Commons, I found the OpenPhoto project (a free stock photo community), I created an account and am gonna share my photos. For no specific reason really, just to see how it works:)
By Nana | January 10, 2005 | Topics: Tech |