As Far As I Can Tell

Yesterday I went to a panel discussion called “Who Owns Ideas?” hosted by In These Times magazine and held at the Chicago Historical Society. The event was part of an ongoing show of artwork entitled Illegal Art. It was a really interesting talk on the current state of copyright laws and the lack of flexibility they allow artists in creating work. Panelists included Lawrence Lessig, D.J. Spooky, Jonathan Tasini and Jenny Toomey.

Most interesting to me was Lawrence Lessig, a professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-creator of Creative Commons. There’s been buzz around the net about Creative Commons for about a month, and I’m really excited about the possibilities. Their first project is a set of legal licenses you can associate your work with that act on a “some rights restricted” policy rather than the default automatically assigned “all rights restricted”. This sort of opt-out decision by artists and culture creators makes it easy for individuals to buck the copyright system while the process to actually change it in underway.

There is a great Flash animation that explains how and why Creative Common licenses work. One very promising application of this idea is that license choices can be embedded digitally into work that’s created. In the future search engines like Google can use this information to allow searches such as “Show me all the photographs of Navy Pier that are free for non-commercial use with attribution”. Creative Common licenses don’t just provide the tools to let you tell others how they can use your work, but let other artists find and use that work.