Creative Commons

The Creative Commons (CC, at CreativeCommons.org) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organization has released a number of easy to understand Creative Commons Licenses using simple graphics and labels defining or restricting certain rights of the work in question in a modular way, with Metadata and URL links making the licenses easy to use. They allow Copyright Holders to avoid the problems sometimes experienced by sharing work in the context of Copyright Laws, which attach ownership at the time of creation, and on the other hand, to avoid the complex “legalese” and attitudes of some Open Source license options.

Creative Commons hoped to counter the ill effects of what is an over-stated dominant and increasingly restrictive “permission culture”, as Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and former Chairman of the Board, described. This is “a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”.^[1] Lessig maintains that Modern Culture is dominated by traditional content distributors who maintain and strengthen monopolies on cultural products.^[2][3] Creative Commons has even gone so far as to provide a “Founders' Copyright” intended to circumvent the original U.S. Copyright created in the Constitution.^[4]

Criticism from Copyleft and Copyright

However, the stance of Creative Commons misses the fact that such monopolies simply cannot control creators at all. One does not need permission to create - one simply creates. The stance also misses the fact that a content creator has unrestricted access to distribute their own work their own way - it's just that they may not be “selected” by the monopolies for marketing purposes. For example, anyone can write a book and publish it, but without the monopolies, it is unlikely that book will become a national best-seller overnight, because the “New York” publishing monopolies select books, often capriciously, to become best-sellers before the book is even available for sale, long before it hits the shelves.

There is also an irony in attempting to circumvent U.S. Copyright Law, while providing licenses which respect the inherent rights of a content creator to choose how a work is distributed. Copyright attaches to a work from the moment it is fixed in tangible form, and the copyright owner has always been “Free” to choose any form of license or distribution from that point forward at any time, with or without the help of Creative Commons, “Open Source”, or “Free” license demonstrators. The very fact that any creator (irrespective of employment obligations) can choose to use a Creative Commons License, or any license terms at all, points to the openness and flexibility of U.S. Copyright Law, which merely attaches ownership and control of a work to the person who created it, which is only common sense.

At the same time, the Creative Commons was pre-dated by the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL), both allowing forms of “Free” distribution. Usually, one is locked into one of these or other licenses when copying or distributing work which is not one's own (such as for some of the content which has been adapted and corrected for GetWiki). The GNU FDL was intended mainly as a license for software documentation, but is also active, and actively avoided, by non-software projects as well. The Open Publication License is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects should not use it. Both licenses contained optional clauses which made them less “Free”. For example, the GNU FDL had a requirement that the licensed work be distributed in a form which is “transparent”, or not in a proprietary or confidential format.

Yet, the “Copyleft” Community has been critical of the Creative Commons, and while many early claims have been rendered moot over time, controversy still lingers, if hollow. The critical positions (and non-positions) can often be categorized as stating that CC has no ethical or political position. The Copyleft often feels that CC failed to set a minimum standard for its licenses, or does not have an ethical or political position on which to base its licenses. They argue that Creative Commons should define a set of Core Freedoms or Rights which all CC licenses must grant, and these are often the same Core Freedoms at the heart of the “Free Software Foundation” or “Free Software Movement”.^[5]

References

1. Book, Lawrence, Lessig, free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf, 2004, Free Culture, Penguin Press, New York, 8.
2. Journal, Ermert, Monika, Germany debuts Creative Commons, Register, 2004, theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/.
3. Web, Lessig, Lawrence, 2006, Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons and the Remix Culture, mp3, Talking with Talis, talk.talis.com/archives/2006/01/lawrence_lessig.html, 2006-04-07.
4. Web, Founder's Copyright, Creative Commons, creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/, 2006-04-07.
5. Benjamin Mako Hill, Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement.

Early Scholarship

• 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. agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a035925&id=a035925s5t6/ video
• Brown, Glenn Otis. “Academic Digital Rights: A Walk on the Creative Commons.” Syllabus Magazine (April 2003). www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7475
• ------. “Out of the Way: How the Next Copyright Revolution Can Help the Next Scientific Revolution.” PLoS Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 30-31. www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000009
• Chillingworth, Mark. “Creative Commons Attracts BBC's Attention.” Information World Review, 11 June 2004. www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155821/
• Conhaim, Wallys W. “Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain.” Information Today 19, no. 7 (2002): 52, 54. www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020603-2.htm
• “Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses.” Cover Pages, 28 April 2004. xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-04-28-a.html
• 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. www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/
• Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi. “Free Culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons.” (2004). eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000122/
• 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.
• Plotkin, Hal. “All Hail Creative Commons: Stanford Professor and Author Lawrence Lessig Plans a Legal Insurrection.” SFGate.com, 11 February 2002. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/11/creatcom.DTL
• Schloman, Barbara F. “Creative Commons: An Opportunity to Extend the Public Domain.” Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 13 October 2003. www.nursingworld.org/ojin/infocol/info_12.htm
• Stix, Gary. “Some Rights Reserved.” Scientific American 288, no. 3 (2003): 46. www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=7&articleID=000C2691-4F88-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF
• Weitzman, Jonathan B., and Lawrence Lessig. “Open Access and Creative Common Sense.” Open Access Now, 10 May 2004. www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=16