The Importance of Our Public Domain (and Why I'm Giving Away Some of My Work)

Currently in the U.S, it stands that an author of a work retains the copyright of produced materials for his/her lifetime plus 70 years. There are materials out there, great works of art, great works of writing, and great works on film, sitting and collecting dust, slowly deteriorating, unrecognized and unnoticed because of their copyrighted limitations.

There are films and photographs that aren’t able to be distributed even though the author may be unknown and the will only be available for redistribution after they have become a pile of dust. What use are they if no one can see them? Ever? I’m sure the original artist, having knowledge of the internet age, would much prefer that their work be seen by millions rather than to sit on a shelf.

Internet v1.0

When the current internet is just a frail machine sitting in someone’s back office, restricted in its use to the organization that houses its contents, unable to share the contents because of our insane restrictions, I’d be saddened to know that some of my work would be sitting on there unable to be seen by the public.

So what can be done? In comes the Creative Commons.

Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

James Boyle just wrote a good book called The Public Domain, Enclosing the Commons of the Mind that I’ve just skimmed through that talks about why copyright and patents are so ridiculous (did you know crust-less sandwiches were protected by a patent?), and how releasing work under the Creative Commons can help advance our culture. And yes, it is even released under a creative commons license itself.

What can be done with Creative Commons Work?

Lots. A ‘closed’ piece of work can gain much more exposure from a creative commons license. Check out The Shared Culture to learn a little more about the license and definitely watch Larry Lessig’s presentation from TED, How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law.

Take my work!

I promised in my Blogging Resolutions that I would release my work under a Commons license and even relinquish some of it to the public domain.

Today, all my articles are being released under the “no derivative works license” and I’m releasing a number of my portfolio pieces (All of my ink drawings and illustrations) under the Attribution 3.0 license. What does that mean?

As long as you attribute the original work to me. Easy enough.

I chose not to use the ‘share alike’ license so that if you want to create a new piece of work from them you don’t have to give the new work out under the same license.

So please take what you want and do what you want, but please support the cause at CreativeCommons.org and do the same with your own work. I hope you can make good use of them.

As I continue to release my work, I’ll probably even start giving away the source files too. Call me crazy.