The Beeb and CC
James Grimmelmann
james.grimmelmann at yale.edu
Tue Jun 8 15:41:58 EDT 2004
At 10:50 AM 6/8/2004, Greg London wrote:
> > Ben Francis <lists at hippygeek.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> >>If CC are making a concious decision NOT to make the licenses DFSG-free
> >>and have a good reason for doing so,
>
>Wildly unsubstantiated conjecture follows:
>
>I believe Creative Commons was started by Lessig and Eldred
>after they lost the lawsuit against the government challenging
>the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act
>and losing. (Eldred v. Ashcroft)
CC was founded in 2001, and launched its licenses in December of 2002. The
Supreme Court agreed to hear Eldred v. Ashcroft in February of 2002 and
issued its decision in January of 2003. I don't think that this undermines
your point.
>Since they failed to affect the law in the courts,
>they took the approach of affecting behaviour through
>Creative Commons and its new licensing model.
They're both attempts at restoring balance to copyright. A third would be
legislative: the Eric Eldred act and other attempts to get Congress to roll
back the more destructive aspects of copyright. Larry Lessig has been
giving presentations for a while now that emphasize the point that
copyright law is now written so that it extends all sorts of exclusive
protections to people who don't need or want them; Creative Commons is both
an attempt to highlight the damage this maximalism does to freedom and
creativity and an attempt to undo some of it by giving people the tools to
disclaim unneeded parts.
James
Disclaimer: I may be a law student and a CC intern, but I'm neither a
lawyer nor speaking on behalf of CC. These are just my personal takes on
issues I think are interesting.
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