Some time ago, I wrote a post talking about Creative Commons licenses, simple licenses that seek to provide authors with protection for their work and readers with greater flexibility than what currently exists under international copyright law. You can check out my original post here. Over at Locus Online, Corey Doctorow, speculative fiction author and champion of the Creative Commons License, talks more in-depth about the history of copyright law and the usefulness of the CCL:

It would be nice if our lawmakers would go back to the drawing board and write a new copyright that made sense in the era of the Internet, but all efforts to "fix" copyright since the passage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 have only made things worse, granting more unenforceable exclusive rights to an ever-increasing pool of "authors" who have no need or desire to sue the people with whom they are engaged in the business of "culture" — holding conversations, publicly re-imagining the stories that make up their lives.

 

Creative Commons aims to do what Congress won't or can't do — offer an approach to copyright that helps those of us who don't want deal that Disney and their pals have insisted on for every snatch of creativity. Creative Commons achieves this through a set of licenses, legal notices that set out permitted uses for creative works.

All Creative Commons share a set of basic terms. Every license requires "attribution" — subsequent users have to keep your name on your work, and let everyone know that you're the originator of it; and every CC license permits noncommercial sharing of your work — people can make as many copies they want and give them to whomever they want, provided they don't make any money from this activity.

I've been fascinated with this idea for quite some time. As part of the management team that launched the 3rd Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game back at the turn of the century (I'm feeling old), I supported Ryan Dancey in his push to open the core rules system for D&D using a modified Open Source license that has some similarities with the Creative Commons License.

One of the things that the CCL can do is encourage broader distribution of a creative work by the fans of that work. In the era of Web 2.0 and even greater connectivity, their is a great deal of power in viral marketing, whereby fans of particular works proselytize and pass on what they are passionate about. Currently, much of the fan distribution of work is a violation of Copyright law, but the CCL provides broad "rights" for such distributors while protecting the author's ownership of the work.

For those of us not published by major houses (with their own marketing departments), such a license can be critical in establishing a wider international reader base. Heck, even established writers (like Doctorow and others) only benefit by having their work more widely translated and discussed.

Anyway, check out the rest of Corey's article, it's a fascinating post.