Some Thoughts About Copyright and Where It's Going


I've  come to realize that an entire semester could easily be spent studying copyright laws and practices and still not cover it all. This is clearly an important topic to educators as they and their students re-use content of all types.


One subject that interests me as US copyright law gets ever more lobbyist driven, with the influence of money increasingly outweighing the need to disseminate knowledge, is the growth of alternatives like the Creative Commons license and copyleft. I'm curious to see as this drama unfolds, how big are these non-commercial alternatives are going to get and how useful they are going to be for the people who need them the most.


Open source software is already a force to be reckoned with in the programming world. Questions for which answers may not yet exist: can the model of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and related systems in the software world be adapted to broader areas of creative expression? To educational content? Are there signs they are already doing so?