Have you ever come across the term “Some Rights Reserved” sitting in the place where you normally find “All Rights Reserved”? Well, if you have, you have probably found video, code or graphics produced, remixed or reused by a person that believes that culture ought to be somewhat more free than it usually is today. “Some Rights Reserved” states that the owner has chosen to open up his or her content for ex. sharing and remixing using Creative Commons (CC). The intention with CC is to avoid some of the problems (that we know are big) with todays copyright laws.

The man behind the CC movement is Lawrence Lessig, a professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Not only is Larry a very smart man and a good writer, he is also a mind blowing speaker and his latest (and last) talk on “Free Culture” is what inspired me to write this post.

So what I really want to communicate here is what we at the Physical Interaction Lab are doing to support this movement. Apart from stickers on our laptops and heavy use of t-shirts we also try to live as we learn by releasing everything we do under licenses provided by CC. For example, this entire website is released under “Some Rights Reserved”. That means that all of our images, all of our code, all of our schematics and all other information is sharable, remixable and reusable under the following license. We also talk about the effects of using CC when holding lectures or presentations about what we are trying to accomplish as we see the use of the new licenses as an important strategic decision. A decision that you and your company should really think about.

Additionally we try to release all of our personal digital information like pictures on flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us and other kinds of data on services we use that supports the free choice of which copyright license to use.

The thought of Creative Commons and Free Culture is extremely cool but also very important for the development of culture in our society. If you watch Lessigs talk you will understand why.