Net Clearinghouse for Creatives

A documentary filmmaker needing a shot of the New York skyline could use the clearinghouse to find royalty-free footage. Or a small-town orchestra with limited funding could find pieces to perform for free.

Currently, a filmmaker or orchestra director must track down a copyright holder, obtain permission and often pay royalties. Projects may never take off if copyright holders won't license their works.

Copyright holders who choose to participate in the Commons may set general conditions such as allowing royalty-free use only in noncommercial settings, but they won't be able to veto individual projects.

Users would be able to search for digital and physical materials at creativecommons.org.

Spearheading the effort is Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a prominent scholar who complains that the current strict legal interpretation of intellectual property rights frequently stifles the type of sharing that spurs innovation.

The Creative Commons seeks to counteract that tendency.

Molly S. Van Houweling, the project's executive director, said the clearinghouse is ideal for start-up bands and lesser-known authors who want their works more widely heard or read.

More established creators, meanwhile, may wish to donate their works so that noncommercial projects could succeed, she said.

Contributors retain copyrights on their works. They can still sell them -- for instance, they can offer them through the project royalty-free for noncommercial use but charge others independent of the Commons.

The Creative Commons has raised nearly $900,000, mostly from the Center for the Public Domain, a nonprofit foundation.

The scope of copyright law has grown over the years.

Initially, a book's author or publisher had to register works with the U.S. Copyright Office. Now, a copyright is automatic.

And while copyrights lasted 14 years in 1790, Congress gradually extended them. A 1998 law protects works owned by individuals for 70 years after their death and those owned by corporations for 95 years.

The extension means that websites must wait longer to legally post works that would have soon entered the public domain. Web publisher Eric Eldred, a board member for the Creative Commons, is among the plaintiffs challenging the 1998 extension in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Several groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have pledged administrative support. O'Reilly and Associates, a technical publisher, plans to donate some of its books, while the Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives are looking to contribute their archives of moving images, Van Houweling said.

The Creative Commons will need much more to be useful. Organizers are hoping to get more contributions over the next several months and begin allowing exchanges by the fall.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a University of Wisconsin professor critical of modern copyright laws, praised the initiative for enabling creators to become less beholden to traditional publishers and distributors.

But the Commons won't address key objections raised with a separate 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection technologies or discuss methods for doing so.

Critics say the prohibitions restrict scholarly research and other "fair uses" that are normally legal under copyright law.