Lawrence Lessig, Alternative Licenses for Intellectual Property, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). A letter to the editor in response to two earier CHE stories on Creative Commons (here and here). Excerpt: 'The headline of the [first] Creative Commons article states that our licenses for the arts have not caught on in academe....There is an important error in that article. Ms. Foster wrote that "only about 3,000 records" are licensed under our licenses. The number is in fact over 4,500,000 -- in less than two years. It appears that Ms. Foster may have taken her number from one directory that lists some of the Web sites using our licenses. But that, of course, is just a single directory, and some sites contain thousands of articles, pictures, and films. The [second] article about the Science Commons carries a more troubling error. The article centers on an imagined conflict between Science Commons on the one hand and technology-transfer offices, the Bayh-Dole Act, and patents on the other. This is a shame because much of what Science Commons will be doing has little to do with universities' licensing policies, and those portions that do are far from anti-patent, or anti-university-licensing....None of our initiatives implies an attack on patents, licensing, or Bayh-Dole, any more than Creative Commons implies an attack on copyright. We hope to work with, not against, the technology-transfer offices. They, too, we suspect, are not fans of unnecessary burdens created by the law."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2004 07:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
