More Creative Commons Comments

After talking about copyright laws in class and thinking about it some more, I think Dvorak is probablly correct in saying Creative Commons doesn't really have any power. However, I'm not sure it's completely useless like he says. I think it's a good way for people to say, "Yes, I know this is my stuff and I automatically own the rights, but I'm going to put it out in the public and give you the freedom to do whatever you want with it." Maybe CC isn't the best system for people who are hard core about copyrighting their stuff and don't want anyone using it in any way, but for people who believe in open source, it's a good way to go. Also, like someone mentioned in class, alot of people (like me) know next to nothing about copyright laws and aren't sure what they can legally do, so it's just convenient to have something on a site that says, this is what you can do.

So, I think CC is a cool idea, but I'm not sure if it will really catch on because it really is an open source idea and I'm not sure our capitalistic society likes open source. The introduction to the McLeod article we had to read for class talks about how our society has only benefited from open source type stuff, but at the same time it points out ways that both business and individuals are trying to keep their stuff to themselves because they want to make all the profit from it and don't want others to profit. I like the example of the VCR that it uses to show that something that was once thought would end the movie business has helped it so much. Even though the article is arguing that freedom of expression requires less rigid copyright laws, I don't see big money-makers backing down. It's just not the way our world works. Anyway, I only had time to read the introduction and the beggining of Chap. 6, but I'll probablly have more thoughts on McLeod by Friday.