Stefan Johansson
12th November 2007, 22:40
We came across a very good initiative on the web, the Creative Commons licenses, related to copyright on the web. Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation.
Creative commons (http://creativecommons.org/) provide free tools for how sharing of information could be regulated, illustrated by the qoute from their web site below.
Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
At 99nicu and according to our Forum rules (http://www.99nicu.org/forum/showthread.php?t=8), each individual member has the formal copyright of his/hers own contributions to the 99nicu information database. A member can choose to erase contributions for any reason*.
But in addition, we have decided that all contents at 99nicu is also regulated by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). This means that anyone is free to copy, adapt, distribute and transmit the work, as long as 99nicu is attributed accordingly.
* This individual copyright can be over-riden only be the 99nicu Team, which can edit or erase information, if a member violates the Forum rules.
Creative commons (http://creativecommons.org/) provide free tools for how sharing of information could be regulated, illustrated by the qoute from their web site below.
Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
At 99nicu and according to our Forum rules (http://www.99nicu.org/forum/showthread.php?t=8), each individual member has the formal copyright of his/hers own contributions to the 99nicu information database. A member can choose to erase contributions for any reason*.
But in addition, we have decided that all contents at 99nicu is also regulated by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). This means that anyone is free to copy, adapt, distribute and transmit the work, as long as 99nicu is attributed accordingly.
* This individual copyright can be over-riden only be the 99nicu Team, which can edit or erase information, if a member violates the Forum rules.