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The Maturing of New Economic Models

by biverson | December 2, 2007 at 02:16 pm | 319 views | add comment

Jimmy Wales turned 58, but the party wasn't for his birthday. Wales, of Wikipedia was joined by Larry Lessig a prime mover behind the "Creative Commons" licenses which offer an alternative to traditional copyright law which has been strained to the breaking point by the transformation of information from analog, physical form, into digital, electronic form, and the new logic of how information should be licensed, copied, distributed, and shared.

What I’m happy to announce tonight is that just yesterday the Wikimedia Foundation board voted to approve a deal beetween the FSF and CC and Wikimedia. We’re going to change the GFDL in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is important because it will make using information from Wiki to create new works more straightforward than it was with the previous licensing, and it will raise the credibility of Creative Commons licenses to a new level. The whole Open Source movement and new economic models that rely on giving information away and sharing information freely in order to generate economic value will get a boost from this.