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Creative Commons

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The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.






Aim

The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a 'Founders’ Copyright' [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.

All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture pervading modern society; a culture pressed hard upon society by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema.

History

The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License (OPL) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The GFDL was intended mainly as a license for software documentation, but is also in active use by non-software projects such as Wikipedia. The OPL is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects not use it. Both the OPL and the GFDL contained optional parts that, in the opinions of critics, made them less "free." The GFDL differs from the CC licenses in its requirement that the licensed work be distributed in a form which is "transparent," i.e., not in a proprietary and/or confidential format.

File:GoldenNica CreativeCommons.jpg
Golden Nica Award for Creative Commons

Headquartered in San Francisco, Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001. Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman, started the organization as an additional method of achieving the goals of his Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft. The initial set of Creative Commons licenses was published on December 16, 2002. [2] The project was honored with the Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica in the category "Net Vision" in 2004.

Localization

The non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal model in mind, so the wording may not mesh perfectly with existing law in other countries. Although somewhat unlikely, using the U.S. model without regard to local law could render the licenses unenforceable. To address this issue, the iCommons (International Commons) project intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. As of November 30, 2005, representatives from 46 countries and regions have joined this initiative, and licenses for 24 of those countries have already been completed.

Projects and works using Creative Commons licenses

Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. Common Content was set up by Jeff Kramer with cooperation from Creative Commons, and is currently maintained by volunteers.

Some of the best-known CC-licensed projects and works include:

Record labels

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

Criticisms of Creative Commons

With its world-wide success and early honeymoon period, inevitably there has been a more critical attention focussed on the Creative Commons movement and how well it is living up to its perceived values. The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into the following types:

  • A 'Free software'/Moralistic position - These mostly rely on a moral discourse pointing to the lack of a clear value-led stategy for Creative Commons (e.g. See Hill 2005 and the writings of Richard Stallman).
  • A Political position - Where the object is to critically analyse the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an immanent critique (e.g. Berry & Moss 2005, Geert Lovink, Free Culture movements).
  • A Commonsense position - These usually fall into the category of 'it is not needed' or 'it takes away user rights' (see Toth 2005 or Dvorak 2005).
  • A Pro-Copyright position - These are usually marshelled by the Content Industry and argue either that Creative Commons is not useful or that it undermines copyright (Nimmer 2005).

Criticisms of Creative Commons (unspoken)

  • The potential that Creative Commons creation of humanly readable axiomatic encodings of legalese is a threat to the potential to hide special and unsavory conditions of media use. Its obvious that major corporate entities would loathe the potential that consumers may adopt such encodings as a defacto standard to pre-filter out media that do not align with the consumers expectations. Thus the potential to automatic boycott due to prejudice on the grounds of the legalese protecting a product.
  • Creative Commons aims to protect artists and consumers, not coroporate entities who may or may not have any concern for the artists or consumers specifically.
  • Creative Commons may do some copyright lawyers out of a job.
  • Creative Commons may open the market to many more artists (and thus more competition for major-league corporate entities).

External Articles

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Creative Commons.

References

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