All Hail Creative Commons

Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig and a small band of collaborators at MIT, Duke, Harvard and Villanova are about to embark on a new endeavor that could help reignite the global high-tech economy.

A prolific thinker, writer and doer, and a national authority on intellectual-property law and a former columnist at The Industry Standard, Lessig is perhaps best known as the author of two of the most important books yet produced about computers, the Internet and how our legal system deals with them: "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," and his more recent work, "The Future of Ideas."

In an interview last week, Lessig confirmed the basic details about his latest venture, Creative Commons, which is slated to be formally unveiled in a few months.

In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.

The first set of licensing options Creative Commons plans to make available are designed mostly for people looking for some protections as they move their wares into the public domain. Those protections might include requirements that the work not be altered, employed for commercial purposes or used without proper attribution.

Lessig adds that it's possible Creative Commons' licenses may eventually evolve to include options that permit or enable certain commercial transactions. An artist might, for example, agree to give away a work as long as no one is making money on it but include a provision requiring payments on a sliding scale if it's sold. As participation in the Commons project increases, a variety of specific intellectual-property license options will evolve in response to user needs, which in turn would create templates for others with similar requirements.

Within a few months, artists, writers and others will soon be able to go online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made license they can append to their works without having to pay a dime to a lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase similar legal services.

"We also want to facilitate machine-readable languages," adds Lessig, who will be taking a partial leave from Stanford to help jump-start the Creative Commons effort.

In Lessig's model, an MP3 song or a document or any other intellectual property would contain a special machine-readable tag that specifies the exact licensing terms approved by its creator. That means film students making a movie, for example, could do a search, say, for jazz songs released under public domain-friendly licenses that they can use for their soundtrack without charge.

At the same time, Creative Commons also plans to build a "conservancy" to facilitate the preservation and sharing of intellectual property.

A Win-Win Proposition

In one masterstroke, Lessig and colleagues will empower creators of intellectual property by giving them more control over their work while also increasing the communal technical resources that contribute to innovation and growth. The result will be a new spark of life for the Internet, and for the tech sector in general.

Rather than abandon an outdated software program, for example, a computer company would have the option of donating its source code to the Creative Commons conservancy, where people could build on it to create other new and useful products.