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 legally to build upon and share.

Contents

1 Aim
2 History
3 Localization
4 Projects using Creative Commons licenses

4.1 Notable works
4.2

5 Tools for discovering CC-licensed content
6 Criticisms of Creative Commons
7 Creative Commons in court
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

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" 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, in the words of chairman of the board Lawrence Lessig, a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture, "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

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.

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

Localization

The non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system 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 June 2006, representatives from 49 other countries and regions have joined this [initiative], and licenses for 31 of those countries have already been completed.

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.

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

Media archives (for a subset of works where the uploader chooses a Creative Commons license): Flickr, Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, and Ourmedia
Groklaw
MIT OpenCourseWare - academic course syllabi
Jamendo - Music archive
BeatPick - Music label and licensing project that seeks to redress the balance between the label, artist and consumer.
Public Library of Science
Star Wreck movies, the most recent being [[Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning]]
The podcast This Week in Tech
Wikinews, Wikitravel, Memory Alpha, Uncyclopedia, and many other wikis
ccMixter, a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons
GarageBand.com, music site for exposure for unsigned bands
[Open Clip Art Library]
20 minutos, a free Spanish newspaper

Notable works

Professor Lessig's 2004 electronic version of the book Free Culture. (The printed version of the book, however, was published under a full copyright.)
Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks:How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Dan Gillmor's We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People
The fiction of Cory Doctorow
Three of Eric S. Raymond's books: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the first complete and commercially released book under a CC license, published by O'Reilly & Associates), The New Hacker's Dictionary and The Art of Unix Programming (all three with added proviso)
Teach, a 2001 short film directed by Davis Guggenheim.
Cactuses, a 2006 full-length dramatic movie.
Elephants Dream, a 2006 CG short film created with open-source software

LOCA Records
Magnatune
Fading Ways Music
Disfish
OnClassical
Opsound
Kahvi Collective
Small Brain Records
Krayola Records

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

iRATE radio
Gnomoradio
[Yahoo! Creative Commons Search]
[Google Advanced Search]
[CC:Mixter] - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
Common Content
Jamendo - An archive of music albums under Creative Commons licenses
[Mozilla Firefox] web browser with default Creative Commons search functionality
[The Assayer] - A catalog of free/copylefted books
[Flickr Creative Commons search] - Photos on Flickr
[Creative Commons Find Page]
[Open Clip Art Library]
[everystockphoto.com] - Search engine and member bookmarking for Creative Commons Photos
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

Criticisms of Creative Commons

During its first year as an organization, Creative Commons experienced a "honeymoon" period with worldwide success and very little criticism. Recently though, critical attention has focused on the Creative Commons movement and how well it is living up to its perceived values and goals. The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into complaints of a lack of:

An ethical position - Those in these camps criticize the Creative Commons for failing to set a minimum standard for its licenses, or for not having an ethical position to base its licenses. These camps argue that Creative Commons should follow the model of the Free (libre) or Open Source movements by defining a set of core freedoms or terms which all CC licensed works must satisify. These terms might, or might not, be the same core freedoms as the heart of the free software movement. (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 common sense 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 marshalled by the content industry and argue either that Creative Commons is not useful, or that it undermines copyright (Nimmer 2005).

Creative Commons in court

In early 2006, Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos, without permission, from his [Flickr page], which was protected under a Creative Commons license. While the verdict was in favour of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to Mr. Curry so long as they did not repeat the offence. 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." [link]

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. http://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). http://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. http://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. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155821/
Conhaim, Wallys W. "Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain." Information Today 19, no. 7 (2002): 52, 54. http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020603-2.htm
"Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses." Cover Pages, 28 April 2004. http://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. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/
Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi. "Free Culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons." (2004). http://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. http://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. http://www.nursingworld.org/ojin/infocol/info_12.htm
Stix, Gary. "Some Rights Reserved." Scientific American 288, no. 3 (2003): 46. http://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. http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=16

External links

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

[Special]

[Creative Commons]
[A short Flash animation describing Creative Commons]
[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)
["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")
[Remix Group on Flickr] -(imaginative reuses of Creative Commons images)
[Creative Commons Search] from Yahoo
["Take My Music ... Please"] -(a Newsweek article about Creative Commons by Brian Braiker)
[rel-license] -(a kind of microformat used to indicate that a hyperlink to a license means the document is available under that license)
["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)
["CC365: Creative Commons Song-a-day calendar" The Song-a-day calendar of Creative Commons Music]
[Plugin] for Mozilla Firefox -(displays Creative Commons attributes in the status bar)
[Free the Sounds - A website for sharing and collaborating on sounds, loops, songs, samples, etc. licensed under a Creative Commons license.]
[Berry, D. M. & Moss, G. (2005). On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonalty. 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.]
[Libre Society website]
[Nimmer, Raymond (2005). Open source license proliferation, a broader view]
[Tóth, Péter Benjamin. (2005). Creative Humbug: Personal feelings about the Creative Commons licenses]
[Links to numerous OpenBusiness ideas - business ideas which use Open content 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]
["Richard Stallman on P2P"] an interview by LinuxP2P Forum
[FlickrLilli]: search Creative Commons images on [Flickr]
[Some of The Best Creative Commons Images]
[Greentown article] Overview of copyright history from 1556 leading to Creative
["JCRZ Electro Music : music under Creative Commons license"] example of an artist whose music is under Creative Commons license

[[zh-min-nan:Creative Commons]]

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