CivicActions

Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons has been coming up on my radar alot over the past few weeks. Now, Creative Commons happens to be one of the clients I manage, so I guess that's not too surprising, but I'm talking about outside of work.

For example, this blog post at World Changing is an interview with LL about CC's Developing Nations License. As usual, innovative and thought-provoking ideas from CC. The idea is this: keep your copyright in the "developed" world while distributing it freely (with attribution) in the developing world.

This quote just about sums up why I think it's so important for CC to exist:

"What we're really eager to do is see if there is a way to generalize this and see if there are more people making designs who are willing to share them in this way. We're trying to hack the copyright system, in the programmers sense of hack. Not to break it but make it function in ways it wasn't intended to work. That's not because we're opposed to copyright, but because we're opposed to copyright functioning in ways that don't benefit either the author or the end user. Copyright is meant to be a tool to promote invention."

Exactly. Makes me even more psyched that we at CivicActions are helping Creative Commons to further explore these areas.