Credit Where Credit Is Due

Fortunately for Batts, Ydorb and other self-publishers, a discussion has been underway for the better part of a year now. The Free Software Foundation, which maintains Wikipedia's GNU license, is teaming up with a popular rival licensing movement called Creative Commons to create an interoperable open source standard. "This has been my secret obsession and work for the last four years," says Lawrence Lessig, a Creative Commons founder and Stanford University law professor. "Make the legal issues totally invisible to the average user who is trying to use free culture in a way that is responsible and trustable." By making the two licenses interoperable, for example, users will be able to integrate text, photographs and music samples from Wikipedia with Creative Commons-licensed content on Flickr or jamendo. Posting, reprinting, sharing and otherwise licensing such material would simply require attribution (and not the actual clunky text of the license).

These may seem minuscule developments in the arcane world of open source content, but consider the The Public Library of Science, a striking counterexample to Wiley in that it publishes a group of science and medical journals online for free. Just last week PLoS published findings about fossils of a 110 million-year-old dinosaur that has come to be known as the Mesozoic Cow. The Creative Commons license the paper is published under permits basically any use (commercial as well as noncommercial) so long as attribution is given. The trend here, says Lessig, who sits on the PLoS board of directors, is that more and more important areas of copyrighted works—science, education, all amateur creativity, some professional—are moving toward a freer licensing system.

It's enough to suggest that, for penance, Wiley ought to commission "Open Access for Dummies." Published under a Creative Commons license, naturally.

© 2007