Creative Commons
While it might sound encouraging to believe that “information wants to be free,” this mantra often represents a misguided belief that intellectual property rights have no place in modern society. In fact, this is actually quite far from what Stuart Brand likely meant when he purportedly said this to Steve Wozniak in 1984. What Brand probably meant was that technological constraints placed on information (text, images, code, audio, video, etc.) are by default arbitrary add-ons put in place after the fact – after the initial creation of the item in question – and are therefore arbitrary and typically counterproductive to the widespread diffusion and use of these items. That is, the default state of information is free in terms of accessibility. Locking it down by way of digital rights management (DRM) systems and platforms to protect the intellectual...
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Cesarini, P. (2020). Creative Commons. In: Tatnall, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_52
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10576-1_52
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