Cybersurf

Last week saw the launch of the South African chapter of Creative Commons. This is a new way of looking at copyright protection of intellectual property.

First of all – why has it become necessary to have new types of Copyright laws?

The reason is that new technologies, and especially the internet, have made it very easy to put intellectual property out into the public domain – and have made it very easy to copy intellectual property – or IP as cool people say.

To sum it up with a slick phrase – “we live in a cut and paste society”

Essentially, the Creative commons people argue that existing copyright law is insanely complicated, too restrictive, limits creativity and only serves the interests of large corporates.

They are not against copyright law per se – they merely argue that it is not flexible enough.

At the conference, a representative of Creative Commons in Brasil – and once again Brasil is in the forefront of innovation – cited a case where policemen went into copy shops pretending to be students. They asked the counter hands to make photocopies of some academic material, and when the copies were produced, the counter hands were immediately handcuffed and sent to prison.

Here in South Africa a man was recently sentenced to three years in jail – no option of a fine and no suspended sentence for pirating software – I don’t know if rapists are treated that harshly.

The point is big businesses, and particularly American corporates, control a huge chunk of intellectual property all over the world.

This is done through a World Trade Organisation agreement known as TRIPS – an acronym for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

At the moment, talks between the Southern African Customs Union and the US have been stalled because SACU negotiators believe that the agreement, as it stands, would concede far too many advantages to large American companies.

Creative Commons is a flexible way of protecting your intellectual property. For example, you might publish a book, and allow people to make copies of your work, provided they do so without commercial gain.

A locally published magazine, invites musicians to send in songs for release on a free CD. Naturally many little-known rock groups are only too happy to put their songs on the CD because of the free publicity they get.

One of the big advantages of the Creative Commons licence is that each licence has three versions – or layers as they prefer to call it – the first layer is plain English so that even I can understand it, the second layer is legal gibberish to give the lawyers their jollies and the third layer is in machine code so that your computer can understand it.

To find out more about Creative Commons you should go to …. http://za.creativecommons.org/ - or click along to the Cybersurf blog, where I will put up the address to the South African chapter as well as several other useful links.

The Cybersurf blog is at Cybersurf.blogspot.com…. one more time Cybersurf.blogspot.com and by the way the blog is protected by a Creative Commons licence.

Thanks for listening and till we meet again, remember to keeeeep on surfing.

Relevant Links:

• Creative Commons South Africa
• Creative Commons
• Southern African countries reject the European Free Trade Association's proposal
• Intellectual property: protection and enforcement - WTO site

// posted by Steven Lang @ 9:09 am