The past few days have seen a little buzz about the a license proposal for the internet from Creative Commons. There’s an excellent round table discussion by T Campbell at Comixpedia with Lawrence Lessig, Neeru Paharia, Mia Garlick, JD Frazer of User Friendly and Cory Doctorow. Current licenses tend to be restirctive and cause problems for honest fan art and fan fiction.

In short the proposal has eleven licenses created from four different methods: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works, and Share Alike. These all combine into 11 licenses which allow cartoonists and writers to keep the rights to their work but still allow distribution and fandom. Interesting side note Slashdot has a post which linked several web comics resulting in a slow down in the Keenspot server.