Creative Commons ... by everyone, I guess :-)

The presentation by Creative Commons was thought-provoking for me. A bass artist apparently got verbal permission from Jack of the White Stripes to add his riffs to their music and post it. It's a cool concept but I think the bass player was loony -- that music *is* copyrighted, check out the CD cover -- and if the Authorities That Be from the record company go after the guy, I don't think Jack White's word will be enough to cover the bass player. (If you know anything about Jack White, you know he's not always all there.)

Deciding to "skip the intermediaries" is an interesting concept, but I guess I'm old school, because unless it's a draft that you're willing to throw out to the world, it's a little dangerous. Some writers and authors have used it as a marketing tool to their benefit. Stephen King, for example, posted the beginning of a book chapter in his work "On Writing" and invited his readers to post their endings in an e-mail to him. Tori Amos allows her works to be posted freely and changed into mixes by her fans, which probably just makes her more popular with them. Also, Jennifer Weiner posts the first chapters of her books as a kind of teaser to her readers; we're ready to read the rest of the book when it comes out.

But I think these are varying forms of sharing work -- while King is happy to allow his readers to change and add to his work, Weiner just wants you to read her stuff in the hopes that you'll buy her book, not change her writing. The new concept of "cc"ing a work instead of copyrighting it has a lot of grey areas -- how much does the writer/artist want you to change his or her work? What is permissible? Perhaps a lot of it is in the presentation. A wiki invites changes, for example; a downloadable paper file does not as much, although perhaps it invites more distribution.