Lessig Reviews 5 Years of Creative Commons
Lawrence Lessig blogs on the first five years of the Creative Commons, including what it has accomplished and where it is headed, writing in part:
Our work so far has provided a legal infrastructure to support what our chairman, Joi Ito, calls the “sharing economy.” It recognizes that in addition to the amazing creativity of authors and artists who want to sell their work, there is amazing creativity by scientists, teachers, authors, artists and the rest of us who simply want to share our creativity. CC has provided this economy of giving an infrastructure to support that giving. We have enabled a platform that makes the choice clear, and literally millions of creative works have been offered on that platform.
He adds:
…this year we have added one more important layer to our tools. Building upon our metadata architecture, we have added a simple way for creators to both share, and profit from the creativity that they share. This is the CC+ project. An artist, for example, can release her work under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license, but then, using the CC+ infrastructure, enable those who want commercial rights (or anything else beyond the freedoms granted in the license) to link to a site that can provide those other rights. In this way, CC now helps support a hybrid economy of creativity. We provide a simple platform to protect and enable those who want to share; and we’ve built a simple way to cross over from that sharing economy for those who want to profit from their creativity.
