Creative Commons

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Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to easily communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.

Aim

File:Creative Commons Japan Seminar-200709-1.jpg

Creative Commons Japan Seminar, Tokyo 2007

The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all 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 owners can use when releasing their works on the Web. It also provides RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work, making it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. Creative Commons also provides a "Founders' Copyright" 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 what Creative Commons considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. In the words of Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and former Chairman of the Board, it is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past". Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

History

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Golden Nica Award for Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License 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 Open Publication License is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects not use it. Both licenses 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.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder and former 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.

Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 with the support of the Center for the Public Domain. The project launch had additional support from students and fellows at the Harvard Law School and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Creative Commons is now headquartered at offices in San Francisco. The organisation is run by the Creative Commons Board and a number small administrative staff and technical team, and is advised by a Technical Advisory Board.

The project itself was honored in 2004 with the Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica, for the category "Net Vision".

On December 15, 2006, Professor Lessig retired as CEO and appointed Joi Ito as the new CEO, in a ceremony which took place in Second Life.

Creative Commons governance

The current CEO of Creative Commons is Joi Ito. Mike Linksvayer is vice president, and John Wilbanks is executive director of Science Commons.

Board

The current Creative Commons Board includes ten members. These are: Hal Abelson, James Boyle (Chair), Michael W. Carroll, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Jimmy Wales.

Technical Advisory Board

The Technical Advisory Board includes five members. These are: Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Barbara Fox, Don McGovern and Eric Miller. Hal Abelson also serves on the Creative Commons Board.

Audit Committee

Creative Commons also has an Audit Committee, with two members. These are: Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Lawrence Lessig. Both serve on the Creative Commons Board.

Legal Test Case

The Creative Commons license was first tested in court in early 2006, when podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos without permission from his Flickr page. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial license. While the verdict was in favour of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. An analysis of the decision states, "The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."

Jurisdictions

The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording could be incompatible within different local legislations and render the licenses unenforceable in various jurisdictions. To address this issue, Creative Commons International has started to port the various licenses to accommodate local copyright and private law. As of February 2008, there are 43 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with 8 other jurisdictions in drafting process, and more countries joining the project.

See also: Creative Commons International

Projects using Creative Commons licenses

List of projects 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.

Sampling of CC adoption scope

This list provides a short sampling of CC-licensed projects which convey the breadth and scope of Creative Commons adoption among prominent institutions and publication modes.

Criticism

The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into complaints of a lack of:

• A political position - Where the object is to critically analyze the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an eminent critique (e.g. Berry & Moss 2005, Geert Lovink, Free Culture movements). One of the more notable concerns to be found in this vein of criticism is on the role the Creative Commons plays as an unconcerned corporate filter. As mentioned in Martin Hardie and "Creative License Fetishism", "When one examines closely just exactly what sort of 'freedom' is ultimately to be had within these licenses, one is quick to discover that they are primarily set up as tools meant to feed directly into corporate co-option." Matteo Pasquinelli (2008) describes two fronts of criticism: "those who claim the institution of a real commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non-commercial, share-alike, etc.) and those who point out Creative Commons complicity with global capitalism". Pasquinelli specifically criticises CC for not establishing "productive commons".
• A common sense position (or lack there of) - 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 marshalled by the content industry and argue either that Creative Commons is not useful, or that it undermines copyright (Nimmer 2005).
• Another criticism is that it worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible. Most notably, 'attribution-sharealike' and 'attribution-noncommercial-sharealike' are incompatible, meaning that works under these licenses cannot be combined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the license-holder.

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

• Creative Commons' Search Page
• Creative Commons' Content Directories
• Yahoo's Creative Commons Search
• Google Advanced Search - select an option under Usage Rights, to search for CC content.
• Common Content - now offline (accessed 16 November 2007).
• Mozilla Firefox web browser with default Creative Commons search functionality
• The Internet Archive - Project dedicated to maintaining an archive of multimedia resources, among which Creative Commons-licensed content
• Ourmedia - Media archive supported by the Internet Archive
• ccHost - Server web software used by ccmixter and Open Clip Art Library
• MusiCC - "Your Free Social Booking"

Audio and music

• Electrobel Community - More than 10,000 electronic music songs released under one of the CC licences.
• iRATE radio
• Adrenalinic Sound - Italy
• Gnomoradio
• Starfrosch Community MP3 Blog with a huge Creative Commons Section
• Dogmazic - Archive of free music based in France, one of the main actor of free music movement in Europe.
• Jamendo - An archive of music albums under Creative Commons licenses
• Phlow - Magazine that picks Creative Commons music and music from the Netlabel Community on a daily basis
• CC:Mixter - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
• Date a Conocer [www.dateaconocer.com] - A Spanish archive of music under Creative Commons licenses

Photos and images

• compfight.com – A creative commons image search engine (search by license type)
• Everystockphoto.com – Search engine and member bookmarking for Creative Commons Photos
• Open Clip Art Library
• ccpics.com - Collection of Creative Commons Photos

See also

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• Creative Commons licenses
• List of works available under a Creative Commons License
• Copyleft
• Digital freedom
• FairShare
• Free content
• Free software
• Gratis versus libre
• Open content
• Open source
• Public domain
• Science Commons
• Share-alike

References

• Ardito, Stephanie C. "Public-Domain Advocacy Flourishes." Information Today 20, no. 7 (2003): 17,19.
• Asschenfeldt, Christiane. "Copyright and Licensing Issues—The International Commons." In CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the Benefits of OAI (OAI3), 12 February-14 February 2004 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva: CERN, 2004. (video)
• Brown, Glenn Otis. "Academic Digital Rights: A Walk on the Creative Commons." Syllabus Magazine (April 2003).
• ———. "Out of the Way: How the Next Copyright Revolution Can Help the Next Scientific Revolution." PLoS Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 30-31.
• Chillingworth, Mark. "Creative Commons Attracts BBC's Attention." Information World Review, 11 June 2004.
• Conhaim, Wallys W. "Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain." Information Today 19, no. 7 (2002): 52, 54.
• "Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses." Cover Pages, 28 April 2004.
• Denison, D.C. "For Creators, An Argument for Alienable Rights." Boston Globe, 22 December 2002, E2.
• Ermert, Monika. "Germany Debuts Creative Commons." The Register, 15 June 2004.
• Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi. "Free Culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons." (2004).
• Johnstone, Sally M. "Sharing Educational Materials Without Losing Rights." Change 35, no. 6 (2003): 49-51.
• Lessig, Lawrence. "The Creative Commons" (1994) vol.55 Florida Law Review 763.
• Pasquinelli, Matteo. "The ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage", Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008.
• Plotkin, Hal. "All Hail Creative Commons: Stanford Professor and Author Lawrence Lessig Plans a Legal Insurrection." SFGate.com, 11 February 2002.
• Schloman, Barbara F. "Creative Commons: An Opportunity to Extend the Public Domain." Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 13 October 2003.
• Stix, Gary. "Some Rights Reserved." Scientific American 288, no. 3 (2003): 46.
• Weitzman, Jonathan B., and Lawrence Lessig. "Open Access and Creative Common Sense." Open Access Now, 10 May 2004.

External links

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• Creative Commons and Creative Commons Wiki
• A short Flash animation describing Creative Commons
• Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (20 min presentation on video)
• Creative Commons Explained: Lawrence Lessig on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos
• International Commons: Creative Commons initiatives outside the United States
• ccPublisher -(a tool to tag files with a Creative Commons license and upload them to the Internet Archive)
• Plugin for Mozilla Firefox -(displays Creative Commons attributes in the status bar)
• Common Content -- "a catalog of works licensed in the Creative Commons"
• Yahoo! Search for CC content
• List of Creative Commons Websites
• Musick - A Webradio webcasting creative commons music 24/7

Articles

• "The Commons: The Commons as an Idea - Ideas as a Commons" -(article by David M. Berry about the commons and ideas)
• "BBC to Open Content Floodgates The BBC's Creative Archive project" -(article in Wired magazine on the BBC's use of Creative Commons licenses)
• "Creative Commons: Let’s be creative together" -(from "Framasoft")
• "Take My Music ... Please" -(a Newsweek article about Creative Commons by Brian Braiker)
• "Creative Commons Humbug" -(critical article in PC Magazine by John C. Dvorak)
• "Creative Humbug" -(critical article by Péter Benjamin Tóth)
  • "Creative Humbug? Bah the humbug, let’s get creative!" -(response to Tóth's criticism by Mia Garlick)
• Berry, D. M. & Moss, G. (2005). On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonality. Free Software Magazine. No. 5.
• Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2005). Libre Commons = Libre Culture + Radical Democracy. Noema. No. 44.
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2005), Copyleft hits a Snag. Technology Review
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2005). Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement.
• Nimmer, Raymond (2005). Open source license proliferation, a broader view
• Orlowski, Andrew (2005). On Creativity, Computers and Copyright. The Register
• Tóth, Péter Benjamin. (2005). Creative Humbug: Personal feelings about the Creative Commons licenses
• Richard Stallman explains his disagreement with Creative Commons
• A Debian Developer gives his summary of problems discussed on the debian-legal mailing list (note that this comments on the outdated 2.0 versions of the licenses)
• "Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons" by Jason Scott
• Greentown article Overview of copyright history from 1556 leading to Creative
• Möller, Erik (2006). The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons NC License. Open Source Jahrbuch 2006.
• "Community Created Content; Law, Business and Policy" Hietanen, Oksanen and Välimäki

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