Less than five years ago, Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse was set to expire.
But rather than let Mickey go free and enter the public domain, Disney campaigned with other Hollywood studios and major record labels to press Congress to pass the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), a law that extended copyright protection for another 20 years.
But recent copyright extension laws such as the CTEA are too restrictive, leaving fewer creative works in the public domain, critics say.
That's why a group of legal scholars and Web publishers are launching a nonprofit intellectual property conservancy to help artists, writers, musicians and scientists share their intellectual works with the public on generous terms.
The details for the Creative Commons were unveiled at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California, on Thursday.
"Our tools will make it easier for artists and authors to make some or all of their rights available to the public for free," Stanford law professor and Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig said in a statement.
In addition to Lessig, the roster of luminaries directing the effort includes MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson; Duke Law School intellectual property professor James Boyle; Villanova Law School assistant professor Michael Carroll; Web publisher Eric Eldred; and Eric Saltzman, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPL), Creative Commons is developing a Web application that will be launched this fall to help reduce legal barriers to creativity.
Under current copyright law, creative works are automatically copyrighted, with no notice or registration required.
"(In traditional licensing) there isn't a culture for allowing limited copying in a more relaxed way," Saltzman said. "But there are lots of creators who would like to see their work used in an open and generous way."
"Copyright is about balance," said Glenn Brown, assistant director of Creative Commons. "The Constitution guarantees that balance, but too often public debate and public policy give it short shrift. We hope Creative Commons, among other efforts out there, helps put copyright balance back in vogue."
With the Creative Commons, creators will have alternatives to this "copyright by default."
This alternative may benefit upstart bands, political activists or lesser-known artists who might want to reach the widest possible audience through unlimited copying.
Creators will be able to go to the Creative Commons website to choose from a set of custom licenses that will allow them to indicate, in a machine-readable format, how others may use their intellectual works.
They can use these licenses to set up copying and distribution terms on everything from personal websites to music, film, literature and photography. So an artist can indicate whether their work may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes or with just attribution, for example.
"This enables huge flexibility for people with creative works," Saltzman said.
The licenses will have machine-readable tags, or metadata, so search engines, file-sharing applications, digital rights management tools and other emerging technologies will easily recognize creators' licensing terms.
Directors hope that the project will also empower end-users of creative works.
"Right now it's almost impossible to know what out there is free to use and what's not," Brown said. "Even if there's no copyright notice on a work, chances are it's copyrighted."
Instead of contacting individual authors to ask for permission to copy works, users who want to copy or reuse a copyright holder's work can go to the Creative Commons website to search for the terms under which they can use both digital and physical materials.
Graphic designers, photographers or teachers can use the site to search for images, graphics or course materials. They can search for photographs, articles or songs that can be copied with no restrictions.
"The aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier," said Molly Van Houweling, executive director of the Creative Commons, in a statement.
The group also plans to create a conservancy, so creators will be able to donate their intellectual property rather than handing it over to exclusionary private ownership or abandoning works that might become obsolete due to neglect or technological change.
This repository of donated works held in the public trust will help foster further sharing, directors say.
"This will help seed a very vibrant public domain," Saltzman said.
So far, the nonprofit has raised nearly $900,000, mostly from the Center for the Public Domain.
The Commons is collaborating with a number of organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive and OpenPrivacy.org, to identify potential uses of licensing metadata within content delivery systems and search applications.
The launch of the Commons comes on the heels of intense debates over open source and the public domain between the entertainment industry and online upstarts like Napster.
"The intellectual property wars are raging," Saltzman said. "This is not meant to be either a battle in those wars or a settlement in those wars."
Instead, the Creative Commons is meant to provide an alternative by which people can create work, control it, have it used by others and contribute to new work.
"It's going to get embedded in the way we use the Internet and in new Internet formats," Saltzman said. "This will set a standard for how things can be exchanged, used and found."
