Lessig Heralds Twelfth Birthday of Creative Commons

Harvard law professor and open information activist Lawrence Lessig published a blog post yesterday celebrating the twelfth birthday of the Creative Commons license suite.  The Creative Commons license is a “some rights reserved” licensing mechanism that allows content creators to essentially donate a portion of their otherwise copyrighted works to the public domain, generally with some restrictions on use and/or requirements of attribution.  Lessig, one of the founding forces behind Creative Commons, has been a leading advocate for making information open and freely available, especially online.  As Lessig explains, the Creative Commons license was created in response to the fact that “[t]he internet was changing the way people share, and changing what it meant to be a creator.  But copyright law hadn’t caught up.  The Net was making sharing easy; the law was making it hard.” 

Reporting that more than one billion creative works are now available to the public under a Creative Commons license, Lessig argues that the license does much more than simply facilitate the creation of new creative works; as he states, “CC licenses are having a real impact on people’s lives.  They are helping reveal information used to treat diseases, to make governments more transparent and accountable, and to make education accessible for everyone, everywhere.  That’s an incredible impact for a set of simple, free licenses.”  Read Lessig’s full post here.  To learn more about Creative Commons licenses, or to make a donation to the organization, click here.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Reposted from Creative Commons.