Thanks to Louise Ferguson for alerting us to an appearance in London of Lawrence Lessig who, among other things, is chair and champion of the Creative Commons project. He's speaking at the RSA on the evening of January 14 2004.
Creative Commons promotes licenses under which you can inform people what use they may make of your material, from using it without attribution, to - for example - use and development provided they put the new content back into the public realm under a similar 'share alike' license.
... which reminds me that I should be tagging work on this blog with at least an Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license as journalist Bill Thompson does.
I need to give more thought to how to tag some workshop games that I have developed with Drew Mackie, featured on our new Useful Games blog and on Making the Net Work. We've put up instructions and card sets so people can download and run their own sessions. The idea is that we get feedback, and it is all marketing for our training and consultancy work.
Do we want to make them attributable, non developmental - use but don't change - or allow people to develop (and possibly exploit) provided they share them? Would we pick up more ideas and contacts that way?
It's all a bit academic, because once stuff is on the Net there's not much you can do to control how people use it. On the other hand, I have put up several books and other material on my Partnerships Online site asking people to contact me if they want to use them... and they do. I get requests from around the world from students and professionals, every now and then, asking if they can include content in dissertations of presentations, and of course I say yes. Feels good, and the feedback is indeed worthwhile.
If, like me, you are a freelance who earns mainly from performance at events or consultancy - rather than shifting books or boxes - there seems more benefit in spreading your word than holding it close.
The good thing about the Creative Commons project is that it helps you think those issues through, and shows what others are doing. Take a deep breath, and let go ....
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