Blog3 - wek 1 reply to Bruce Kramer

@ Bruce Kramer

I have to agree with you about the greed balancing the need. It has been my limited experience that large companies are quicker to enforce copyright that the artist that created the work involved. to be exact, I look at how my students use creative commons in their projects. They will often take copyrighted material and incorporate it into their own work. Now if they do this for a class, it is usually not a problem. but if they show their work publicly, it could fall under copyright infringement even though they are not selling their work. For them to use copyrighted material in their projects allows them to create things that they could not create any other way. It allows them to use some really good pieces of music or art to help them in their learning and understanding. To deny them this opportunity because some company feels they are loosing a few dollars is just not right.

Creative Commons Experiment

I am intrigued by the creative commons movement and how one might compare it to the American Revolution and the similarities that can be found within. In Larry Lessig’s TED talk, he mentioned that there is no revolt but rather a movement to extremes in the response to copyright concepts. As in the early days of the American Revolution the extremes were being defined by the loyalists and the patriots but if it were not for the defining document of the Declaration of Independence and the leadership of Washington and other founding fathers the potential of our revolution looking more like the French’s was a possibility much like the lawlessness that we are incubating in our youth with the lack of common sense being applied to the constraints of current copyright practices. The thought I have about the Creative Commons approach is whether it is capable to bringing about the necessary balancing effect to the copyright battleground as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did to the American Experiment.

How much does the Creative Commons approach depend upon the character of the people involved to relinquish the greed that feeds the current extension of the copyright termination to be extended further and further into the future? Will the involved see the needs of the culture taking precedence over the financial gain they could continue to have if they hold firm to reaping from the current copyright laws. Does the 11 possible choices of Creative Commons structuring allow for an effective strategy to balance the personal gain and preserving the culture for healthy growth in both areas? This is yet to be determined but is worth a try since it is obvious the current status quo is destructive.