Creative Commons – Become Their Superhero

Today, Creative Commons team invites you to join their fight for openness and innovation and to become a CC Superhero. “A legion of Creative Commons (CC) Superheroes is already at work, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing all over the planet,” they report at CC website. “Join forces with this legion of CC Superheroes to fight the forces that don’t want an open web, or do not understand that sharing is a good thing. This fall, we’re recruiting a team of CC Superheroes to lead the world in the fight for creativity and innovation. We need to raise $550,000 by the end of the year to power up and support the work we’re doing. As a superhero, your role will be to donate, spread the word, and fundraise on our behalf.”

Skipping the Intermediaries

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”
(Shakespeare, Henry VI, act IV, scene II)

We do not need to kill the lawyers in order to leave them out of the publishing process, but we can simply skip them. By the renewed law of copyright as of 1980s, anything becomes copyrighted the moment it is made, and nothing falls into public domain directly anymore. Corporate giants basically control the rights reserved for your work, and they reserve all the rights. Creative Commons licenses from which you are free to choose allow you to pick from a set of conditions to apply to your work.

Code is Law

What happens if you want your work to be used, shared and built upon? Lawrence Lessig, who proposed the concept of “free culture” is also a founding board member of Creative Commons together with other thought leaders, education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Lessig’s book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace propounded that software has the effect of law, and In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public.Actually, Creative Commons licenses, public domain tools, and supporting technologies have become the global standard for sharing across culture, education, government, science. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” You do not need a lawyer and it is free.

New “Folk” Culture

They teach us at CC to move away from thinking about content to thinking about community. Community builds around culture as culture builds on the past. CC licenses together with internet technology act as a ground work for the new type of folk culture and give authors the way to exercise their copyright in more ways than one and more simply. Founded in 2001, Creative Commons continue lowering the barriers to research and allow for a wider cultural exchange. Intellectual property law doesn’t have to stifle creativity and innovation but can, on the contrary, prove essential to advances in scientific fields. “There has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now,” Lessig states. By joining the legion of CC Superheroes, you can actually both question and fight those controlling processes.