Lawrence Lessig is one of the more interesting voices on the inadequacy and abuses of current copyright laws. He is doing more than talk — he is doing something about it.

The Creative Commons project was officially announced, and its new website was launched, on Thursday, May 16. See http://www.creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons plans to provide a free set of tools to enable creators to share aspects of their copyrighted works with the public or to dedicate them entirely to the public domain. Stanford Law School Professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig described the new project this way when he spoke at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: "Our tools will make it easier for people to make some or all of their rights available to the public for free. If, for example, an artist wants to make her music available for non-commercial use, or with just attribution, our tools will help her express those intentions in a 'machine-readable' form. Computers will then be able to identify and understand the terms of the license, making it easier for people to search for and share creative works."

The tools aren't in place yet but there are some very interesting background papers covering the issues surrounding intellectual property rights and public domain.