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  • From: Lawrence Lessig <lessig AT pobox.com>
  • To: cc-lessigletter AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Community_studios] [cc-lessigletter] CC's Future
  • Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:48:02 -0800

The story so far:

"Next week, a final letter with some final thoughts for CC."

The story continued...

The hardest thing about pushing the work of Creative Commons is the
thought that in 15 years, it will be impossible to explain just why
this work was important -- either because the worst would have
happened, and the technologies that have encouraged the explosion of
creativity we see just now will have been re-controlled, or because
the best would have happened, and the balance that we're pushing for
will have been achieved, in both practice and law.

I'm famous for a certain sort of pessimism. But about this, I'm
optimistic that it is the second sort of change that we're most
likely to see. The creative energy of the next generation will not be
stopped. The technologies of creativity are not going to become
insanely expensive again. And thus, in my view, the most likely
future is one in which this potential for creativity will be
reconciled with a copyright system that offers protection where
that's necessary to create great new works, without burdening the
world of creativity that doesn't depend upon copyright to flourish.

Creative Commons' most important contribution will be to help
transition to this more sensible world. As I've described in these
past weeks, we have already built the infrastructure to help the
"sharing economy" flourish. The tools we've begun to demonstrate at
ccLabs [ http://labs.creativecommons.org ] will also help support the
inevitable growth of a hybrid creative economy, where works are
available freely in some contexts, but commercially exploited in
others. Both bits of legal infrastructure will encourage creativity,
while respecting authors' rights. Both suggest a different balance
the law might strike, when politicians begin to recognize why this
difference is important.

But until the day when this point is obvious, it is critical that we
all continue to push this voluntary, private effort to get artists
and creators to signal to the world the freedoms they believe their
work should carry. We need that signal not just in hundreds of
millions of licensed objects, but in billions of licensed objects. We
need it built into the infrastructure where every creative work gets
made. And we need this as a signal and a practice: as an effort every
creator makes to encourage a certain ecology of creativity.

Over the next year, working with our new Chairman, Joichi Ito, we
will push the program of interoperability that we started last fall.
We will push as well the project of integration into many more
applications of creativity. And most importantly, we will launch an
endowment of the Creative Commons core to guarantee that the central
project of CC will forever survive. Or at least if not forever, until
the point is so obvious that we all can move on.

Thank you again for the support you've given me over these past four
years. And again, please help celebrate this transition by supporting
us in this final week of our fundraising campaign. We need just
$20,000 to reach our goal. If each of you asked just 5 of your
friends to join, we would certainly make that number by December 31.
And if we make that number, it will be much easier for me, after four
very hard years pressing the message of CC, to see this project pass
to a new, and I promise, fantastic leader.

With that final plea, the Lessig Letters end.

----------------------------------

This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig If
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Week 6 – CC Changes
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7158

Week 6 – CC Changes – Spanish Version
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/translations/lessig-letter-06-6-
es.pdf
(Thanks to Maria Cristina Alvite for translation)

Support the Commons
http://creativecommons.org/support

To link to this message, go to:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7176

Archive of Lessig Letters
http://creativecommons.org/support/letters

Learn More
http://creativecommons.org/learnmore

For comics and movies: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/how1,
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/

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  • [Community_studios] [cc-lessigletter] CC's Future, Lawrence Lessig, 12/28/2006

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