Information Research Weblog

Today's Guardian Online supplement includes a report on an interview with Lawrence Lessig - the founder of the 'Creative Commons' movement.

Briefly:

The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.

and there is more about the mission at the Web site.

Creative Commons also has a Weblog - and the latest entry gives information on possible innovations in the nature of the license - specifically relating to educational use. This seems to me to a desirable innovation, but for one fact - that is, that education is increasingly seen as a business and students are paying significant sums of money not only to state-financed educational institutions, but to companies. The borderline between commercial use and educational use, therefore, is disappearing and I doubt if the two can be separated.

What do you think? Post a response to this item by clicking on the 'Reply' button.

The more observant readers of this Weblog will have noticed the Creative Commons badge at the bottom of the main page - to see what it means, click on the badge and a brief statement of the nature of the license will be delivered to your screen.

Google is getting its underwear in a twist about the use of 'google' as a verb and Slashdot reports that its lawyers have called upon Paul McFedries who maintains the 'Wordspy' site to cease and desist from entering the word in his lexicon.

However, another correspondent to the American Dialect Society mailing list has pointed out that, in US copyright law, a verb cannot be protected by copyright, so we can all go on happily googling and the lawyers are just trying it on. Isn't it wonderful when the rug is pulled from under the lawyers? :-)

Last year I received a request from an African aid agency to allow Information Research to be distributed by them on CD-ROM. I had to refuse, since it would have meant contacting all of the authors to seek their approval as copyright holders.

However, it seemed to me that the proposal was a very desirable one, since Web access is by no means universal on the African continent and it occurred to me that the authors would, in all probability, agree.

To overcome the problem of the authors being the copyright holders I am considering putting the following paragraph into the Copyright Policy page:

"2. However, in submitting to Information Research, authors agree to the republication of papers for charitable or other non-profit reasons."

This would allow me to sanction the proposal from Africa, while the authors retain copyright for any for-profit purpose.

I'd welcome feedback, especially from those who have published in the journal.

I'm posting this as a 'Reply' to my earlier message because I am reproducing here a message from Euan Semple to the IR-DISCUSS mailing list. Euan says:

"This group may be interested in the project called Creative Commons run by Porfessor Larry Lessig from Stanford University.

Basically it allows creators of content to explicitly state what for which purposes copying is permitted rather than current copyright law which assumes copyright in all circumstances. They have developed a very user friendly web based process which as Larry says produces Human Readable copyright, machine readable copyright and lawyer reader copyright.

The process is explained at Creative Commons and there is a very good flash movie explaining the context."

I've taken a look and it seems to me that, if Information Research authors were to agree, upon submitting a paper, that a Creative Commons licence would apply to their work, it would nicely establish the appropriate copyright relationships. If you've submitted a paper to IR, please take a look at Creative Commons and let me know what you think. In the meantime, I shall 'talk' with Creative Commons to see how it would work.