Today (April 26) was World Intellectual Property Day, and the theme was “encouraging creativity.”
By the way, a side comment: I forgot to mention yesterday that I was new to the OneWebDay blog. My name is Dan Shockley, I’m a first-year law student at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and I’ll be working for Susan Crawford (a Professor at Cardozo) this summer as a research assistant, helping communicate with those who want to participate on this year’s celebration of OneWebDay.
I came across the notice about World IP Day at CreativeCommons.org. As many of you know, Creative Commons helps creators of music, literature, software, and any other intellectual property by writing standardized licenses. Those licenses bring balance to copyright by allowing the authors some happy medium between “all rights reserved” and releasing directly to the public domain. The author can choose what kind of uses she would like to allow, and can attach a standard license that potential users can read easily to know what is allowed.
One more way the Internet can help us work together – allow us to have reasonable control over our creations and still be able to share what we’ve created for others to build on that work.
