Creative Commons Essay -- Music Musical File Sharing Essays

Creative Commons Creative Commons encourages artists to share and distribute their work for free. And that could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry. People can widely redistribute other people works, as long as they provide the credit to the authors; create new works based on an existing ones, provided they offer those derivations back to the public on the same terms. This paper analyzes the conflicts between the need of technology for creativity and innovation versus the legal aspect of copyright. An alternative emerging approach for licensing music, software, research paper and many other resources on the internet, creative common sharing copyright, is introduced. The paper does not analyze if creative commons is ethical or not; the answer will be yes under all ethical approaches. An ethical analysis on intellectual property, using multiple approaches, is instead presented. Technology and Legal Trend Restriction imposed by intellectual property law, for someone like Laurence Lessig, chairman is a professor of law at Stanford and founder of the School's Center for Internet and Society, have run out of control. The restriction impose by the market and by the state are affecting and threatening internet. Changes in the copyright and patent laws and the regulation of broadcast seem to protect the interest of few against new way of doing things. Law and technology are constantly increasing control on the uses of creative works at a level never seen in history before. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not permit, under the law, the usage of copyrighted material for fair use. Bill Gates recently stated that "If people had understood how patents would be granted when... ...andy Starr, The Creative Commons, February 2004, http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA401.htm 4. Joe Kaplinsky, Who owns ideas?, Frebruary 2002, http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000002D42C.htm 5. Sandy Starr, Copycat copyright, March 2003, http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DCC2.htm 6.Chris Evans, Tightening the net, June 2002, http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006D929.htm 7.Dwight Duego, The boundary of Intellectual Property, January 2004, http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=8778 8. Mark Alfino, Intellectual Property and Copyright Ethics, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Vol.10 No.85, http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/alfino/dossier/Papers/COPYRIGH.htm Useful Links 1. www.creativecommons.org 2. http://www.lessig.org 3. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/ 4. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/