If you've been keeping up with the first link on our blogroll, you might wonder what's up with Lawrence Lessig, considering most of his recent posts have been about politics more than authorship and copyright law. I guess he's starting to focus more on political corruption, but I think [at least at this juncture] he is best known for starting Creative Commons.
CC makes a number of licenses available to artists and authors as an alternative to the "All Rights Reserved" method we see with traditional copyright law. I'm still learning about it, but it seems the the idea is to let others know in what ways you are OK with your work being shared, remixed, or otherwise altered.
So I might go home tonight, take a beautiful picture of the sunset, and decide that I wouldn't mind it being used by other people. I could upload this to my flickr page, slap a CC license on it, and bloggers around the world would be free to repost it in anyway they wish, provided they follow whatever stipulations I have--that my image is not used commercially, that you give me credit for the photo, et cetera. There's a giant pool of CC content available to work from already, and it seems like it will only get bigger.
The main question I have is this: how can I verify that the person who put the license on an object is the original author? How do I know that someone didn't just rip an image off somebody else's website, upload it to their flickr account, and slap a license on it that gives me the right to do as I list. Would I be held accountable if I used that image and the original, true author tracked me down and demanded compensation? I have no idea. I wonder if efforts like CC are making things easier or more complicated, but that's something that might lead to more specific questions that could be answered in a paper. Hmmmm...
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