Emerging Technologies in STC

So says Napoleon.

And that's why I like the readings this week, and especially Bound By Law. Holding Creative Commons aside for a moment, I would venture that the perception among all of us before this week has been that rights to just about all the creative content and intellectual property we see have been completely and exclusively locked away under corporate pressure, to the extent that nothing was allowed for us to work with in an artistic way - even being risky for personal use on sites like Facebook or Flickr - and certainly not in any professional, reproducible, or monetizable way. With entrenched notions of ownership fixed upon direct profit, media giants would surely like to perpetuate that belief (forgive me if I assert this without citing/sourcing any of their actual efforts to that end). It is reassuring to read that the law does not sit so squarely in that corner, and can work both ways.

The point these giants and so many others miss is the one explained through the entire narrative of Bound by Law, but also well illustrated by the IBM-Linux example used throughout Chapter 3 of Wikinomics. "The Commons" in whatever form is a driver of innovation and creativity, and innovation and creativity drive profit. Ideas and content (music, visual, writing, code, etc...) in the public sphere do not zero-sum against private interest. Both readings do a good job of illustrating just how fair use, open source, and related concepts of collaborative use can be enriching to society and broadly profitable for even the biggest corporations. One is tempted to surmise that those entities that rail so hard against these movements do so out of desperation, for lack of any true future vision or talent.

That should bring us to Creative Commons. A brilliant idea and a bright light in the copyright darkness. For purposes of our own wiki, I think if we are to use a CC license the only reasonable choice is the "Attribution(by)":

Not to diminish our hard work and diligence in collecting data and providing summaries and insights (and whatever else we do from here), but everything we are doing is sourced directly from other material we are using freely or maybe in a fair-use context. We're also deriving our benefit from the class itself in credits and knowledge, and what else would we realistically expect to gain? To me it's cut and dried, so I'll be very interested to hear any different takes on that.