Blog Post 1 - Daniel Wahlstrand

The section of this weeks readings that impacted me the most was Tavani's piece on Creative Commons. CC seems to have successfully reached a comfortable middle-ground between copyright protection and sharing information. The four options they provide for each license says it all (Tavani, 259).

• Attribution - Permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and/or derived works as long as credit is given.
• Noncommercial - Permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and/or derived works as long as it is used non-commercially.
• Derivative - Permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies. No derivatives.
• Share alike - Permits others to distribute derived works only under an identical license.

In the piece Tavani quotes Lawrence Lessig, a co-founder of Creative Commons, as saying that the current version of copyright law "restricts more than it inspires" and promotes an "all or nothing" kind of protection scheme. He says the middle-ground is achieved by offering a "some rights reserved" approach to copyright protection (Tavani, 258-9). Within the CC license, the author or creator is able to choose what secondary uses of their material are allowed and what conditions need to be met before building upon another creator's work. I, like Lessig, am a firm believer in that the Internet is an innovation commons and that compromise might be the only way to come to an agreement, or at least come to terms, over intellectual property.

On further inspection, I believe an argument can me made that Creative Commons may have successfully co-aligned the three philosophical foundations for intellectual property rights. The aspect of being paid for one's work is respected, CC's policies promotes social utility, and freedom of expression is protected (Tavani, 249).

Overall I have gained the most information from the intellectual property readings. I record music on my own off and on, but have never officially published anything. I now have a better fundamental understanding of how to go about doing this and how to properly copyright my music.