By Emrakeb Assefa

JOHANNESBURG-- Described by many the father of Creative Commons (cc), Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and successful author is excited about the three-day “Towards an African Digital Information Commons conference being held in Johannesburg, this week. Creative Commons (cc), an initiative born in the United States with a number of progressive thinkers from various universities including Stanford, MIT, Duke and Villanova, is now taking a firm hold in other continents. Lessig, one of the main speakers of the conference, has high hopes that the concept is taking root in Africa. The project makes available flexible, customisable intellectual property licences that creators and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. Creative Commons provides a balance between the full copyright control normally accorded intellectual property and the unfettered, free-for-all of the public domain. In an exclusive interview with the Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), Lessig speaks of what motivated him to launch the movement, and the thinking process that made cc a compelling concept among many free culture activists. Coming from a law background in the United States, a country with some of the most stringent copyright laws in the world, Lessig is an authority on intellectual property law and his two books on the subject namely “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” and “The Future of Ideas” are frequently quoted when discussing Creative Commons.

Though considered the father of Creative Commons, Lessig modestly declines the title saying the ‘idea’ behind the initiative was the brainchild of his client Eric Aldridge who sued Ashcroft in the United States Supreme Court over repeated extensions of a copyright over a period of 40 years.

“We lost the case; but it gave birth to the cc initiative,” he says.

A father of 20-month-old son, Lessig reticently compares his fatherhood to that of him being the ‘father’ of cc. According to him, as a father to his son, he played a tiny part, which he calls ‘the fun part’ in the beginning. But when the fun ends, others do the work, he notes, drawing an analogy between how he is performing as a father to his son to that of his role in the cc movement.

He says while he is having all the fun traveling all over the world, launching Creative Commons projects, his wife is raising his child alone just as other people are promoting the cc movement in different parts of the world.

But in the words of Heather Ford, Commons-sense Project Manager at LINK Centre at Wits University, Lessig is the bravest man she knows. He launched Creative Commons against the flow of the mainstream establishment and broke free of the elitist culture of the legal fraternity.

Lessig says cc aims to build a legal framework that is empowering and allows the products of human cultural creativity to enter the ‘lawyer-free zone’ of the public domain. It builds on the notion of the inflexible copyright tradition of ‘all rights reserved’ to constitute a concept of ‘some rights reserved’ where the ‘right to copy’ means making attributions and protecting the ‘moral rights’ of the creators by not misrepresenting their works.
Talking of his expectations and challenges in introducing cc into the African continent, Lessig says he generally encounters two conflicting viewpoints from audiences. “There is a lot of interest in cc as it allows a kind of freedom in which creativity can flourish in a contributing manner. But there is also a lot of skepticism such as the view that we are trying to take down business models like the music industry by taking out copyright.”

He says the second perspective is wrong. As a lawyer, the idea is to make copyright more flexible and easy for use. “It is a little bit like the personal computer when it was first introduced; difficult and complex to use. But Mackintosh made it user friendly. In a similar manner, we want to make a Macintosh of copyright law so that it becomes user friendly and is controlled by the creators rather than the other right users such as publishers.” Hence, the “right holders” who are themselves often not the authors of creative works, but rather big firms who own the rights and aim to maximize their value, can become redundant as the license is made easily accessible and as such it is a lawyer free zone.

“Our initiative is to get the law out of the way and get creativity along the way,” Lessig affirms.

“There are a lot of people who hate copyright, but we are not here to replace copyright but to use and build on it so that the artists have control over their creativity, not the publishers or the big music companies,” he explains. In this manner, the ‘right to copy’ goes beyond commercial use and allows the sharing of cultures such as African culture.

At first glance, the idea of cc might appear to be “guilty of elitism” in the African context since the target audience of cc is an online audience, and thus not a majority audience. But many people in Africa go online as ‘proxies’ for others who do not have regular access.

For example a schoolteacher in search of some teaching aids to be printed out and used off-line in classroom; or the university librarian who surfs in search of a reasonably priced online database that can later be used by an entire academic community.

But there is more to it, explains Lessig.

“Our first target is creators and not internet users. We are here to facilitate licenses that allow artists to create culture and contribute on existing cultures,” he states.

He further explains that cc can be more useful in Africa as its image is more interesting and more compelling than what is shown in the media – “about fighting, starvation, diseases and so on,” he says, adding, “There is a bigger picture and an initiative like cc allows African artists to have access to the mainstream culture industries to introduce their compelling cultures, music and arts.”