• BusinessWeek
• Business Exchange

Copyright Joichi Ito—Creative Commons Attribution Licensed

Lawrence Lessig

It was Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig's vision that led to the launch of the Creative Commons in 2001. Lessig's original idea was simple: Copyright laws aren't a good fit for the Internet's culture of sharing. But creating the organization and sustaining took a lot more coordination. "It required a business infrastructure to adopt it, people to use it, a social movement to back it, and a recognition of why it's important politically as well as ethically," says Lessig.

Despite the group's progress, resistance among businesses remains. "It's actually hard to practice sharing," says Lessig. "In the recording industry or film industry, the difficulty is both mentality and the existing business model. In the end, it's more expensive to be proprietary than it is to be open."

next slide previous slide