Colleague Chris Boulton, a student of the moral implications of popular culture, is also a warrior for the copyright rights of new creators. He’s among the supporters of the SPARC Author Addendum [2]; created by Creative Commons and SPARC [3], it's a clause attached to the license academics sign with any publishing house that allows the authors to retain certain key rights (rights usually denied by publishers) and ensure a broader distribution of their work. Whereas usually these publishers are absolutely rigid, Chris and his fellow authors report that they just got the publisher of an academic journal to agree to the SPARC license, because they banded together. SPARC is a good example of expanding the flexibility of copyright by improving the flexibility of licensing. Chris also has tested the flexibility of copyright on the user side—Fair Use, which is the right to use copyrighted material without licensing it. His masters’ thesis incorporated fashion ads for children, which he was only able to incorporate by aggressively employing Fair Use. His story is told in a laugh-to-keep-from-crying video [4].
Links:
[1] https://archive.cmsimpact.org/blog/paufderheide
[2] http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml
[3] http://www.arl.org/sparc/
[4] http://www.vimeo.com/1231277?pg=embed&sec=1231277
[5] http://twitter.com/intent/tweet