(2002-02-12) a

Lawrence Lessig is launching Creative Commons. 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... 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... For years now, Lessig and other critics have maintained that inflexible copyright rules as they exist often just protect entrenched -- and usually uncreative -- interests at the expense of virtually everyone else, including many of those the copyright rules were originally supposed to protect.