501derful.org
Please watch the 3 minute flash movie! Here is a neat concept … some rights reserved. By registering your content here you can give people the right to access it and then remix it. Others will have the rights to pieces of your old term papers, art work, photographs, and even your original music. This is a very innovative idea that challenges the paradigm that every thing is for sale, and that there is no community commons.
This is verrry interesting, Randy. The interesting thing is that the Internet has always been a medium for communal sharing going back to communities like The Well and newsgroups. Then we’ve been watching the polarized struggle between traditional publishers like the infamous Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) to preserve their old business models by suing downloaders to preserve the old notion of copyright. On the other side we have open source software and open source science journals to break the death-grip of publishing monopolies. It’s always seemed to me that alternative models are possible. After all, people used to make their own music in families and communities, and science used to be amateurism. Professional recording is a phenom of the 20th century; no reason the 21st couldn’t be a whole new model.
And let’s remember, volunteerism is possibly the original creative commons.