As the global face to the Creative Commons, iCommons is the group responsible for spreading the ideas of Creative Commons -- "open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture" -- around the world and doing it as a united movement. How we create and handle content internationally is perhaps even more interesting an experiment than how we do it here in the U.S., and so I was very happy to get the chance today to contribute a post to the iCommons blog. While, as I should mention, I still wrote on something here in New York City, that's only because I don't know much about the international stuff yet.
A debate over the originality of the design of the Freedom Tower -- that's the memorial to be built in the site of the former World Trade Center -- reached the courts recently, an unusual turn of events because architecture is very much a "remix" art. Designers borrow ideas from each other all the time and are reluctant to take each other to before the law. Here's a snippet from my post:
Shine vs. SOM became the first major case of architectural copyright infringement in U.S. history, in large part because of its high profile - the design of the Freedom Tower was on the cover of New York papers for many months. But cases of architectural copyright don't often make it to the court for another reason. The field itself is built on the idea that new work is built on old work, new ideas remixed from old ones; and architects are reluctant to challenge that prevailing norm. But in this case, the court found that Childs appeared to have gone beyond permissible architectural borrowing. The design of the two proposed buildings were so similar - both featured a twisting diamond-shaped facade unusual in architecture - that the court ruled that the case could proceed to trial. (Judge for yourself.)
Of course I have to say this, but I do think it's an interesting issue. I for one don't think much the collaborative creative process behind how big buildings get built, not nearly as much as I might think how music is created. So it was great fun for me to dig more deeply into this idea of whether theres is an architectural "commons."
Anyway, hope you'll check it out. And thanks of course to iCommons for lending me a bit of their space.
