How Crass.

You know what sucks? When people steal your ideas, your sayings, just your things in general, especially when they don't give any credit to you, the original creator.

Take for example a recent situation of mine. I use the word 'crass' to describe things which lack class/are annoying/pretty much anything I don't like. So the word may not necessarily mean that. And as you might know, it's not a very common word that people use. So when one of my friends started using it I was just like "what the?" And then he started using it around other people, and thus it lost it's value to me. Although he has kind of stopped saying it now, so I can reclaim what was once mine.

So that may be a menial thing, but I think it's a global cultural thing that people will generally become annoyed if someone takes their idea without acknowledging it. This brings up the issue of copyright and patents. While I don't really think copyright/patents are good things, I am an active supporter of the creative commons licence idea. In that, I'm all cool for people to take my ideas, but it should be on my conditions. Like they can build on them and make it their own, so long as they credit the idea back to me, and they don't intend on making money off it.

The basis of Against Intellectual Monopoly was that copyrighting can lead to the detriment of information and its availability. But I think the key quote was "For all the emotion, it seems both sides agree that intellectual property laws need to strike a balance between providing sufficient incentive for creation and the freedom to make use of existing ideas."

So do creative commons licences allow this balance to occur? Maybe people should be available to hold a copyright for a small amount of time?

All that I know is that if creative commons were to be expanded and adopted as the primary mechanism for protecting ideas, I think there would be a greater flow of information and innovation in the world.

I think this video explains a lot about Creative Commons and from reading the comments, it has inspired a lot of people: