Address: Stanford Law School, 559 Nathan Abbott Way
Location: Stanford, CA, 94305-8610
Email: lessig@pobox.com, carinee.johnson@stanford.edu
Website: www.creativecommons.org
Work: 650-736-0999
Cell: 650-723-8440
Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control, a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy, a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation, once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them to declare "some rights reserved."
Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons'' current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.