The Creative Commons by Corey Doctorow is essentially discusses two main ideas. The first half of the article traces copyright back through history, highlighting the advantages, disadvantages and advancements that have occurred. The latter half of the article discusses what Creative Commons seeks to do: their objectives, services and how and where they operate.
As mentioned, the article commences by prefacing the reader with background information regarding copyright. A summation of the first paragraph indicates that initially, for the vast majority of the time that copyright has been in place, it has not been something applicable to a broad range of works. Rather, copyright was only granted and applied to a very specific and unique group of works. More specifically, governmental associations only granted copyright to authors who had or were registered with national libraries. This method proved adventagoues in the sense that copies of the copyrighted work were held in the respective governments repositories, thus making it easier to locate and identify the individual creator of the work if they needed to be contacted.
Next part is about the Free Software. The comparison between free speech and free beer is set up early within the article to illustrate to the reader that free software is a matter of liberty, not of price. Essentially, a users access to Free Software comes in conjunction with four associated freedoms.
*The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (Freedom 0)
*The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish(Freedom 1)
*The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (Freedom 2)
*The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the general public, so that the whole community benefits.
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