Difference between revisions of "Creative Commons"

Revision as of 06:27, 11 December 2011

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California whose aim is to realize the full potential of the internet and drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity ^[1]. Essentially Creative Commons builds upon the already existing copyright protection which is applied to any kind of work immediately after it is conceptualized. Creative commons creates a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the internet and the reality of copyright laws. Creative Commons provides an infrastructure which consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. This done using a simple standardized way so artists can choose what level of copyright protection they desire. This ability plays a large roll on the Internet because information can be easily and legally, copied, distributed, edited and built upon. Specifically, this done using 6 difference creative commons license types which give owners varying degrees of copyright protection. Furthermore CC are recognized globally and licenses apply to affiliates all over the world. CC is especially useful because its licenses and tools were designed to work specifically with the web, which is rapidly becoming the easiest and most convenient method for information sharing. In addition to its license CC also offers legal tools such as CC0 which is a public domain dedication for rights holders who want to put their work in public domain in advance of the expiration of their copyright.

History

CCreative Commons was founded in 2001 by the Center of the Public Domain. It's organizational structure is a board of directors which are leaders, education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Currently Hal Abelson, Glenn Otis Brown, Michel Carroll, Catherine Casserly (CEO), Caterina Fake, Brian Fitzgerald, David Guggenheim, Joi Ito (Chair), Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Annetter Thomas, Jimmy Wales, Esther Wojciki (Vice Chair) are members. Next in 2002, CC released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public and was inspired by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License. By 2003 approximately 1 million licenses were in use, and by end of 2004 an estimated 4.7 licensed works were using CC. By 2009 there were estimated 350 million CC licensed works, and Wikipedia migrated to CC Attribution – ShareAlike as its main content license. Most recently in 2008 Lawrence Lesigg stepped down as CEO of CC and was replaced by Joi Ito, currently Catherine Casserly in now CEO. ^[2].

Name

Creative Commons is a common place for its users' information. The term commons is used because that is what the company set out to create; a common place where professional works can be accessed, and as the website says, "copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon".

Legal

Ethical Issues

The most common criticism of the creative commons license is that the creativity of individuals can be exploited by others without investing as much time in creating original content. This idea lumps those using the creative commons license into the mindset of rehashing old work without contributing anything novel.

Because of the low amount of official administration under creative commons, many people can abuse works under its license by claiming others' work to be their own. Smaller groups of content production, like bloggers or small news publications, can be greatly affected by others taking their work under the Creative Commons license and reusing it.

License Types

The Three Layer Concept

^[3] Creative Commons licenses are written in three "layers". This is done to make CC even easier to use. The first layer happens to be the legaleze that actually dictates the legal aspects of the license. Legal writing is often difficult and hard to read for most of the people that use Creative Commons so the company provides the second layer which is called the Commons Deed but is often referred to as the Human Readable version. This layer provides an easy way for the every day non-lawyer to understand what exactly the license allows for and covers. The third and final layer is the "machine readable" version. This allows for software and search engines to know what is available under a CC license.

Creative Commons offers six licenses for use and all of the licenses require attribution when using the work but don’t limit users ability to copy and distribute it.

Attribution license(abbreviated to 'BY')

Allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only as long as credit is given. ^[4]

Attribution Share Alike (abbreviated to ‘BY-SA’)

You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Attribution No Derivatives (abbreviated to ‘BY-ND’)

You let others copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of your work, but not derivative works based upon it.

Attribution Non-commercial (abbreviated to ‘BY-NC’)

Is the attribution which dictates that the original work cannot be used for commercial purposes.

Attribution Non-commercial Share alike (‘BY-NC-SA’)

Is similar to BY-SA, but with restriction that further uses can only be non-commercial.

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (‘BC-NC-ND’)

Similar to BY-NC, but original material cannot be changed or adapted in any way. This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses. The work cannot be used commercially, nor can it be altered in any manner. ^[5]

• Creative Commons Symbols
• 

  Attribution

• 

  Share Alike

• 

  No Derivatives

• 

  Non-Commercial

CC Zero

‘CC zero or CC0 was introduced in 2008 and waives all copyright and puts material straight into the public domain, with no restrictions as to use.

What is copyright: Copyright law grants an author right over their work from the moment of its conception. Furthermore, copyright law prohibits the making of copies without rights holder’s permission. However, due to the nature of the internet copyright is increasingly relevant because of the ease of violating copyright law.

Criticism

Criticism with creative commons occur in several different areas

1. While Creative Commons is revolutionary in design, its success depends on users reading and understanding copyright protection properly. Situation captured in case of photographers and their images…
2. Anti-Public Domain – One critique of Creative Commons is that creative common licenses confuse notions of what the public domain and what the common is, and therefore contribute to the decline of the public domain. According to Susan… she argues that authors need to understand what is meant by the public domain, and beliefs about what the legal definition depend on preconception of what the public domain is. Since creative commons blurs the line between these two separate spaces for information it is argued that creative commons takes away from content in the public domain.
3. Distinction between commercial and non-commercial is unclear: Another critique is that what is allowed to be used commercially and non-commercially is not declared specifically and is a result of poor description in creative commons. Scenarios which represent this are as follows:
   1. Creative Commons licensed work is permitted to be used for non-commercial purposes and a university seeks to copy the work for student course pack of materials. While copying for education is allowed, it is not clear whether it is allowed under Creative Commons. Furthermore, since the work is being used by an educational institution does it follow that use is non-commercial. Next, if work is used on a website or blog which contains ads, is this allowed under non-commercial use? These questions are not clearly defined or answered in creative commons.
4. Lack sufficient provision for moral rights protections: Another issue raised due to creative commons are the moral protections authors should have. According to Susan… these include an author’s right to attribution and right of integrity (the right not to have work subjected to derogatory treatment) However, under creative commons licenses it is possible to use an author’s work and build upon it and can reflect negatively upon creators because what they envisioned for their work can be altered and presented in a different form. Based on CC laws once a work is declared Creative Commons rights cannot be retracted and can have detrimental effects on potential professional careers.

Practice

The popular social sound platform Soundcloud gives users the option to use the Creative Commons license or All Right Reserved. If the user chooses the Creative Commons license their works will be available for other users to modify based on which protection layer was chosen. ^[6]

References

1. ↑ About http://creativecommons.org/about accessed December 04 2011.
2. ↑ Board of Directors http://creativecommons.org/board accessed December 08 2011.
3. ↑ License Types http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ accessed November 5 2011.
4. ↑ http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
5. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
6. ↑ http://soundcloud.com/help/legal#what-is-creative-commons