OPEN

Good interview in The Guardian with Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who cam up with the concept of "creative commons" an alternative to traditional copyrighting of content on the web.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a must-read piece. The interviewer (John Sutherland) explains the need from his point of view:

This article, like others in the paper, will be blogged and circulated
across the web tomorrow. Neither I, nor the Guardian, nor all the
rules, regulations and penalties of copyright law, can stop that
happening.

That’s right.

Lessig sums up why creative commmons has been such a success (last year 45 million people downloaded the licence) as follows:

if everyone attached their own copyright licence document to their
content you would have freedoms and restrictions asserted but basically
useless because the cost of understanding them would be too high. What
we do at Creative Commons is to standardise around a simple set of six
core licences the freedoms that our research has found most important,
and then allow people to signal those freedoms in a way that is
understandable and – most importantly – machine-readable.

To find out even more, take a look at the Creative Commons organisation’s website.