Creative Commons
About six month ago I discovered an exciting idea by James Boyle exposed by the CBI. What caught my eyes was that we miss a common language to describe the over-propertization and the frontiers of property. Boyle looks back at the environmental movement of the 1940’s and 50’s and points out that the invention of the term environmentalism was able to tie people together and help them move further on ecology matters (the CBI article incorrectly mentions "environment" which appeared in French in 1300.)
Like environmentalism led to ecology movements, we miss the semantic tools to build an equivalent movement that would work on subjects such as anti-monopoly, public domain, private property vs. commons. According to Boyle, the dimensions of property (as private property and the commons) are (cost vs. no cost) x (control vs. free) x (individual rights vs. collective rights).
James Boyle is a co-founder of Creative Commons, which promises to do to creative works as much wonder as did the GNU GPL to software. A definitive must see to whoever is conscious about Intellectual Property matters.
