Week 8 - Response To Content

Creative Commons

"Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity."
                            -- creativecommons.org

The idea of Creative Commons is one of freedom, freedom to use the internet to it's fullest without being condemned by the copyright laws. 

As Cory Doctorow from Locus Magazine puts it, 

         "Since 2003, the Creative Commons movement has ridden a worldwide revolution in creativity and sharing, inspiring the authors of over 160 million copyrighted works to adopt a "some rights reserved" approach that encourages sharing, remix, and re-use of their works."

Think about what the internet would be like today, if this visionary change had not been implemented, although people may have been able to access imagery and reproduce it, they wouldn't have been able to do this legally and many different works would not have become as well known as they are today and communities like 'Deviant ART' might not even exist., in fact the picture above was taken from a Deviant ART user under a Creative Commons license.

If there is one thing we might learn from this, it should be that in order to allow our society and culture to grow, we must share and respect each others works and you never know, your work might become famous on the internet! 

Creative Commons IV, Image is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License, Imran Abdul Jabar, http://imranabduljabar.com/

Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Viewed 13/09/2011 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Cory Doctorow explains why strict copyright doesn't make sense for some things.
* Doctorow, Cory. (2007). "Creative Commons". Locus Magazine Online.