Lawrence Lessig (1961 - now) is an American lawyer best known for founding Creative Commons in 2001. Wikipedia says,
"A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted 'work'. A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use and build upon a work that the author has created." (Wikipedia: Creative Commons license, 3.2.22 UTC 19:31)
The rest of this post is some quotes from Lessig.
Innovation
"If the internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit." (May the Source Be With You, 2001)
"Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator." (May the Source Be With You, 2001)
Copyrights
"In the context of software development where you have sequential and complementary developments, patents create an extraordinarily damaging influence on innovation and on the process of developing and bring new ideas to market." (Code + Law interview, 2001)
"We are a cut and paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut and paste culture is criminal." (AZQuotes.com)
"Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process." (Free Culture, 2004)
"What's needed is a way to say something in the middle - neither 'all rights reserved' nor 'no rights reserved' but 'some rights reserved' - and thus a way to respect copyrights but enable creators to free content as they see fit." (Free Culture, 2004)
