Open Content

QuickLinks:
Creative Commons
The Filter
GrepLaw
Copyfight: The Politics of IP
Digital Media in Cyberspace

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

Fellows and students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School helped get the project off the ground. Creative Commons is now housed at and receives generous support from Stanford Law School, where Creative Commons shares space, staff, and inspiration with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. The Board oversees a small administrative staff and technical team, and is advised by a Technical Advisory Board. Creative Commons is sustained by the contributions of a growing group of supporters.

In its prior incarnation, Creative Commons was called Copyright's Commons, and joined as a plaintiff in the Eldred v. Ashcroft lawsuit challenging the recent copyright term extension act.

Published via email (and mirrored on the Berkman Center website), The Filter offers a unique take on today's most pressing public interest-oriented Internet issues through the eyes of leading experts, scholars and researchers. The Filter features reports and interviews with those involved in the evolution of the Internet in politics, law and policy, culture and media. Berkman Center staff, fellows and research associates contribute both technically and substantively to producing The Filter, which bears a "not-a-copyright" notice encouraging readers to freely copy and share its contents. With The Filter, the Berkman Center hopes to foster a useful space in which the public can discuss the events and ideas arising from the evolution of technology in our societies. Plans for future development of The Filter include the use of the Berkman Center's software tools to expand the Web version of the publication.

GrepLaw is the Berkman Center's community forum for cyberlaw news and discussion. Built with Slashcode, GrepLaw invites the Internet community at large to contribute stories and weigh in on developments likely to impact the Internet's ongoing evolution.

Placed under a Creative Commons license permitting widespread copying and redistribution, Copyfight: The Politics of IP is a weblog exploring the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill policy-making, technical standards development and technological innovation that creates--and will recreate--the networked world as we know it.

New technologies have a tendency to disrupt the accepted way of doing things, since well before John Henry and the steam drill, and Gutenberg's printing press. The tension between new and old is always high at moments of transition. Such a transition is upon us now.

The Digital Media Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in collaboration with Gartner|G2, the business strategy research arm for Gartner Inc., aims to extend our understanding of the current landscape and unresolved questions related to the distribution, use, and control of digital media.