My opinion

i believe that copyright is there for a reason, otherwise people would not make money for their hard work. However, i think that sometimes the default copyright laws are too restrictive for no good reason and people should be more open to sharing their work.

Unfortunately there is a mentality in some people where they believe that if they have created something then the must get every penny out of its worth, not what it is worth to them but what it is worth to other people. This is why the copyright law is so strict by default.

Creative commons have the right idea, where there is much more freedom when sharing work, even the Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives option, which allows for distribution as long as the author is credited and the work is not altered at all (which i believe is the idea behind youtube and flickr licenses). Obviously this cannot work for everything, where the company relies on the sale of its product, such as books and movies, but there really shouldn't be restrictions if, for example, a student wants to use something in his work as there is no commercial gain involved. In particular i think that the most interesting option put forward by the creative commons is share alike, where anybody can use your work in their work as long as they use the same license for theirs much like open-source computer programs.

Before writing this blog, I was only vaguely aware of the creative commons movement but it is really good idea and more people need to be aware of it to give the option to designers.

Creative Commons

creative commons is a set of rules created to allow creators of work more freedom when sharing their work and using other peoples. It fills in the scale between full copyright where nobody can share anything or use anything and everything is free to use and anybody can claim other peoples work as their own

Creative Commons have 6 main licensing groups, depending on how much freedom you want people to have with your work.

Attribution You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

Noncommercial You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

There are many other forms of copyright that can be used by combining two or more of these, as described here

Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright.

The opinion of this film leans more towards free availability of work, but not for commercial use, musch like the perspective of creative commons.

Flickr

One of the most popular websites for sharing photographs is Flickr, this is an online community consisting of professional and amateur photographers alike. They have a set of rules about copyright as stated on their community guidlines page.

These state that you cannot take somebodies photo and pass it off as your own, it also says that you cannot use them for commercial use. You can use the photographs on websites and forums but you must place a link back to flickr.