Thursday, January 9, 2003

A Group Offers Model Licenses for Free Sharing of Scholarly Material By ANDREA L. FOSTER Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly material, music, literature, film, and science widely available to the public, launched a new project last month to encourage creators to share and reproduce their works. Lawrence Lessig, a cyberlaw expert who is a professor at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, helped start the nonprofit group, which is housed at the law school. Creative Commons draws its inspiration from the open-source-software movement, and Mr. Lessig is an outspoken advocate of revising copyright law to favor consumers over copyright owners. The group has drafted model licenses and is offering them to creators free of charge. The licenses, available on its Web site, allow creators to relinquish some but not all rights to their works. Under the current copyright system, creators automatically assume all rights to their works; others seeking to republish or redistribute the material must first have the author's permission. By contrast, under one Copyright Commons license, works can be distributed provided the creator is given credit. Another scheme allows a work to be distributed only for noncommercial uses. A third license gives people permission to copy a work but bars them from making derivative works. "The academic community is sort of a natural for us," says Michael Carroll, an assistant professor at Villanova University School of Law who serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons. Especially in the scientific community, he says, scholars are less interested in retaining all rights to their works than in seeing them widely distributed. So far, Rice University's Connexions, a repository of college-course material, has endorsed a Creative Commons license that allows authors' works to be copied and distributed but only if they are given credit. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Open Courseware project, which provides the public with free, searchable access to the institution's course materials, is expected to license its material under the Creative Commons model later this month. Creative Commons is also working to build a public "conservancy" of works that it considers of unique intellectual value. The conservancy would prevent the works from being privately owned. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Justice Department reportedly is prepared to challenge affirmative action in 2 Supreme Court cases Hispanic groups urge Bush to support U. of Michigan's defense of affirmative action in admissions Senate Democrats call for substantial increase in spending on Pell Grants Top undergraduates increasingly abandon sciences for business and other fields, study finds A group offers model licenses for free sharing of scholarly material