If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
There seems to be a number of copyright review processes underway these days and thank goodness for that. What strikes me is how important it is that we lawyers keep the process intelligible to the general public despite the tendency and temptation to completely geek out (in the legal sense). Lawrence Liang spoke about this a little in his introduction to the BISA (Brazil, India and South Africa) Copyright Review process where he talks about one of the goals of this process: to produce a human readable report that is both meaningful and engaging.
It is easy for us legal types to forget that, for the most part, the general public is peripherally aware of copyright in their daily lives and perhaps only marginally aware of copyright's implications on a very real, personal level. Discussions about alternative licensing models and even review of copyright law itself is akin to a discussion about life on other planets and whether those aliens have 3 legs or 4.
The challenge here is that without popular support for a copyright review process it is largely academic and not terribly relevant to the general public. If this process is to yield real fruit then it can't be yet another dry, largely academic exercise with big words and confusing arguments. Those valuable academic and policy perspectives must be converted (translated, even) into straightforward and interesting language if this copyright review process is going to make a real difference in the lives of those people who could most benefit from these anticipated reforms.
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