OK, so yesterday I found out about this thing called Creative Commons. It's basically an interesting way of not reserving all the stuff that copyright normally allows you to. In other words, you can make stuff freely available to people to use, as long as they abide by the rules of the licence that you hold with Creative Commons... I'm not doing a great job of explaining it here - but it is a really good idea, maybe esp. for groups like Sanctus1 to share materials we make and create for other people to use. Oh, just look at their site! It's all explained on there...
Esp. make sure you look at the wacky cartoons... :-)) Nice!
http://creativecommons.org
It sounds like the idea of 'open source' which there was an article about in a Guardian special supplement on Saturday which I am half way through reading. Though I haven't actually looked at the website yet. It's a good idea, I think. I haven't thought about it yet, but within SPEAK we talk about intellectual property rights - both as a justice issue - things like companies patenting basmati rice grown by farmers for centuries so that they have to pay to buy and grow something their community has put years of work into cultivating (how does anyone think this could be right?) - and also as a more general theological and philosophical issue. If we are created by God and gifted by God, do we have the right to the ideas we come up with? It doesn't sound like such an amazing idea written like that... but should we be patenting things and keeping ideas to ourselves and not letting anyone benefit from them?
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Sarah, at 2:14 PM BST