The Creative Commons: Some Rights Reserved

["Darren Barefoot" <darren -at- darrenbarefoot -dot- com>]

It's only been mentioned once in passing on on this listserv, so I
thought I'd mention www.creativecommons.org. They're "devoted to
expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon
and share." They offer a range of simple-to-use partial copyright laws
that may authorize re-use with or without attribution for commercial or
non-commercial use. Current law uniformly grants people complete
copyright the moment they create a piece of work. That's fine, but until
Creative Commons there's been no easy way to refuse some or all of the
rights that copyright grants.

I mention this because I just applied a Creative Commons license for the
first time, and it was a five minute exercise. I plan to apply it to
some of my other writing and my weblog. 

This concept is particularly applicable to technical writing, because
much of the work we do has such a short shelf life. Why protect it for
75 years (or whatever) when it's only applicable for 3? And why prevent,
for example, academic institutions from building on your work?

There is a fantastic (one of the best I've ever seen) instructional
Flash video about Creative Commons here:
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/.


Darren Barefoot
Capulet Communications
Words. Words. Words.
http://www.capulet.com


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