Sharing or Protecting? Copyright vs Creative Commons

The Internet has brought a lot of things with it, such as more and better ways for people to communicate, new business opportunities, and an incredible load of information which leads not to being informed sometimes, but to being infoxicated and misinformed. Even if most of the novelties can be considered as very useful improvements into the way the world works, it involves lots of new challenges too.One of the greatest ones is the management of authors' rights.

Authors' rights, droit d'auteur, derechos de autor, Urheberrecht... most modern languages have a translation for this important issue. And it is important indeed! Does not progress depend on ideas? Are not problems to be faced with the power of someone's brain to generate ideas? Isn't it giving birth to new ideas what being human is all about? Ideas play too major a role in our culture to neglect the importance of their attribution. After all, leaders, spiritual guides and artists are those who greater an impact make on our lives.

Authorship has had a long and interesting role in the history of western culture, especially since the spread of Christianity through the Bible. Think of this: who wrote the Bible? Who is THE AUTHOR par excellence? So sharing vs protecting authorship is not a trivial issue at all, especially since the coming of the World Wide Web.

Well, we might not want to go as far as to play in the league of divinities to claim attribution of our work, but it is definitely worth considering this: what is it to say we are the authors of an idea? I believe that not just authorship, but also our understanding of what ideas are need to be revisited. This is a hot topic everywhere, and laws affecting it can be very controversial. In Spain, as in other European countries, things seem to be moving on, yet it is not clear at all where they are heading to.

Copyright and Creative Commons are two complementary concepts worth learning about. One means to protect authorship, the other means to share it. It seems it is all down to a personal decision: to share or not to share.

Here is a video which I have recently subtitled with my Spanish translation of it. I really recommend watching it. You'll find my translation of this hub published on my website: www.vmtranslator.com.