Beyond the Big (C).

• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 292, Nº. 2, 2005, págs. 8-8
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The article discusses copyright protection laws in the United States. Over the years, Congress has erected immense barriers to derivative works by extending repeatedly both the length and the scope of copyright protection. Copyright in its current form fails to strike a balance between the extremes of allowing total control over every work--"all rights reserved"--and an anarchic system in which pirates steal wantonly without recompense to owners. In 2001 Stanford University legal scholar Lawrence Lessig set about righting this imbalance by becoming the leading force behind Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that furnishes a much needed middle ground that lets owners give up some but not all of their rights. An author still retains a copyright, but only some rights are reserved by choosing among the dozen or so free licenses, denoted by the Creative Commons's mark, that are available for downloading off the Web. Nascent communities of artists, scientists and nonprofits want some way to share and rework one another's intellectual output without the enormous legal burdens that come with increasingly draconian rights management.