Copyight laws may harm writers, artists and musicians at times by making it harder to share their works with other creators and the world at large. Ironically, under certain circumstances, sharing can earn a creator more money. Freebies can be an excellent form of promotion. And ideally creators can easily identify what they want to give away for free and what they want to charge for.
Now a new company called Creative Commons is addressing those issues.
“The firm’s first project,” reports the May 13 New York Times, “is to design a set of licenses stating the terms under which a given work can be copied and used by others. Musicians who want to build an audience, for instance, might permit people to copy songs for noncommercial use. Graphic designers might allow unlimited copying of certain work as long as it is credited.
“The goal is to make such licenses machine-readable, so that anyone could go to an Internet search engine and seek images or a genre of music, for example, that could be copied without legal entanglements.”
The goal of copyright law should not just be to protect good content but also to encourage its distribution. Creative Commons is a laudable step in this direction.
Schools, nonprofits and other noncommercial organizations could be major beneficiaries of this more enlightened approach to copyright. Right now schools and others can undergo nightmares when they want to obtain permission for use of copyrighted materials. The Creative Common approach would greatly simplify matters.
Needless to say, TeleRead-style national digital libraries could build on the work of Creative Commons and similar groups.
