Creative Commons
Copyleft
At one point in time, when personal computers were in their infancy, software and hardware was used and shared relatively freely. Steven Levy in his book Hackers has a good history of this time, and the general practices of the time. Two people featured in the latter portion of his book are, in many ways, diametrically opposed in their views on the copyright of software. One of these persons is Bill Gates, who even when younger supported strong protection for software. The other person is Richard Stallman, who started the Free Software Movement and developed the concept of "copyleft" and the GNU General Public License (GPL).
I wrote a bit about this subject in an earlier module, so here's a brief summary of how this works. A person develops a piece of software. They decide to use the GPL to license the software. The GPL allows others to use the software and makes the source code to the software freely available. If anyone incorporates the software into their creation, however, the resulting software must also use the GPL. In that way, the software continues to be shared. This concept has been extended to a variety of things besides software, and several other groups have drawn inspiration from the GPL. You can now find related "sharing" friendly licenses for games (the Open Gaming License) and the films, books, movies, songs, and other creative works through the Creative Commons (see below).
The term copyleft has been criticized, on occasion, because the license actually supports and is dependent on copyright, and because the term "left" has connotations that aren't really intended.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons is an organization that in many ways applies the concept of sharing to creative works. The goal of Creative Commons is to easily allow authors to license their work in a way that they choose. They can choose to limit the length of time until their work goes into the public domain, or they can choose to allow use of their work for educational purposes without restriction, or they can choose a variety of other options. One of the biggest strengths of the Creative Commons is that it is both machine readable and easily understood by people through the use of simple icons and much more readable text then the underlying legalese license.
For example, the text of this site is licensed under an Attribution-Non Commercial Creative Commons license. To see what this means, go ahead and click on the Creative Commons image at the bottom of the screen.
Creative Commons is increasingly receiving attention from people all over the world. The November issue of Wired magazine featured a section on music and free copying, and provided a CD under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus and Noncommercial Sampling Plus license. Artists included the Beastie Boys, David Bryne, Gilberto Gil, Chuck D, The Rapture, Danger Mouse, and others.
Methods like these show that a culture of sharing information can exist for some works. The trick is figuring out how to use and share these resources. More recently, Wired has had a "Rip, Mix, Burn" issue, and currently Lawrence Lessig writes a monthly column for the magazine.
One group, Wilco, used peer-to-peer file sharing to make their music available once they were dropped from their record label. They eventually hit number 8 on the Billboard charts. They tell their story in a Wired interview, "Music is not a Loaf of Bread."
Marvel v. NCSoft
Ah, a case that brings two of my great interests together... Back in February in 2005, Marvel sued NCSoft, creator of the MMORPG City of Heroes (and now City of Villains) for copyright infringement. Why? Because people could create characters very similar to Marvel's characters. You can read about it from a Game Girl Advance article out at the time, or read a more recent article from Gamasutra. However, the case has been settled, so we won't know what the legality of this situation is until it comes up again. There are several other cases involving video games and copyright, including Blizzard's suing someone for selling a guidebook.
Interviews
During the course of writing the module, I had the opportunity to interview several people and learn about their opinions on copyright. These interviews are also available under a Creative Commons license.
I'll be continuously adding to the interviews and updating the module for the foreseeable future. I welcome feedback and comments at i312co@ischool.utexas.edu.
For those of you enrolled in INF 312, feel free to go to the assignments page of the module.
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