Creative Commons

Creative Commons

URL = http://creativecommons.org/

A set of licenses created by Lawrence Lessig, but also a worldwide movement to promote open access to intellectual content. See ICommons.

If traditional copyright is based on the principle of "all rights reserved", then the CC licences are typified by the principle of "some rights reserved".

The licenses offer 6 core options, whereby the combination of the attribution and share alike principles (see below), correspond to the principles of the Copyleft movement and the General Public License.

Origin and History

The background to the Creative Commons, by Business 2.0 at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/05/01/368240/index.htm

"At a cafe near his San Francisco home, Lessig explains the economic logic that underpins Creative Commons. He draws a timeline on a napkin, labeling one point "1888." "That's when the first Kodak camera was introduced," he says. "And around this time, a legal question arises: Do I need your permission to capture your image? The courts say no, I can pirate your image in most cases." Lessig then draws a line that spikes upward, representing the boom in photo equipment and processing sales that resulted from the liberalization of image content."Imagine if the decision went the other way, so that I had to get permission every time I took someone's picture," he says. "The growth of the photography industry would have been very different." And much less lucrative.

Lessig, 42, has spent the better part of the last decade battling legal decisions that "went the other way" in the digital age. A specialist in policy development for cyberspace, his career has taken him from the Supreme Court (where he clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia), to the University of Chicago, to a tenured position at Harvard Law School, and finally to Stanford, where he founded the law school's Center for Internet and Society. He made headlines in 1997 when he briefly served as a special master in the Microsoft antitrust case. (Microsoft launched a successful appeal to have him removed.)

In the 2002 Supreme Court case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lessig challenged Congress's 1998 decision to extend copyright protection to 70 years after an author's death. In that case, nicknamed the "Mickey Mouse trial" because it coincided with the Disney character's impending transition to the public domain, Lessig argued that most creativity--including Disney movies like Snow White, which was adapted from a Grimm fable--builds on previous work, and that the extension hurt society by limiting the amount of raw material available for creative reinvention. He lost.

The defeat triggered a change in tactics. Unable to reform copyright law, Lessig focused instead on facilitating contractual arrangements between sharers that could be implemented directly in HTML. That's the primary tool artists use to attach Creative Commons licenses to their work. Thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976, as soon as an original work is "fixed"--i.e., takes tangible form--it's automatically protected by copyright. Absent language to the contrary, distributing, copying, or performing that work without permission then becomes illegal. But with Creative Commons, an artist can place a link next to the work--or even embed a license in, say, an MP3 or PDF file--to explicitly grant the permission in advance.

To see how this works in practice, consider the experience of science fiction writer (and Business 2.0 contributor) Cory Doctorow. In January 2003, Tor Books published his hardcover novella, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Simultaneously, Doctorow released the book as a free download on his website, hoping the electronic version would generate buzz and spur bookstore sales. "I didn't do this because I'm a big-hearted slob," he says. "I did it because I saw an opportunity to make more money."

With no formal legal training, Doctorow wanted to tell online readers that he intended to protect his work in a new way. So he linked the online version of his novella to a Creative Commons license. From a menu on the Creative Commons site (see "A Spotter's Guide to Shared Content," page 114), Doctorow chose a license called Attribution-NoDerivs-Noncommercial, meaning that people can distribute his book for free, so long as they credit him as its author; they're not allowed to use it as the basis for derivative works; and to retain his upside potential, such as a movie deal, he requires payment for commercial uses.

In the 15 months that the book has been available online, Doctorow has recorded more than 300,000 downloads from his site. It's impossible to measure the effect that had on book sales, but the initial print run of 8,500 copies sold out, and the title is now out in paperback. Doctorow estimates that the speaking fees he received from people who hired him based on the buzz surrounding the giveaway version exceed the advance he received from his publisher. Meanwhile, after the commercial success of his first book established his credentials as a marketable writer, Doctorow received a much bigger advance for his third and fourth books." (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/05/01/368240/index.htm)

Lawrence Lessig on the creation of the Creative Commons

Lawrence Lessig explains:

"Creative Commons was conceived in a conversation I had with Eric Eldred. I was representing Eric in his case challenging the United States Congress' Copyright Term Extension Act. Eric was enthusiastic about the case, but not optimistic about the results. Early on, he asked me whether there was a way that we could translate the energy that was building around his case into something positive. Not an attack on copyright, but a way of using copyright to support, in effect, the public domain.

I readily agreed, not so much because I had a plan, but because, naive lawyer that I was, I thought we'd win the case, and Eric would forget the dream. But nonetheless, long before the Supreme Court decided to hear Eldred's plea, a bunch of us had put together the plan to build the Creative Commons.

We stole the basic idea from the Free Software Foundation -- give away free copyright licenses. Because copyright is property, the law requires that you get permission before you "use" a copyrighted work, unless that use is a "fair use." The particular kind of "use" that requires permission is any use within the reach of the exclusive rights that copyright grants. In the physical world, these "exclusive rights" leave lots unregulated by copyright. For example, in the real world, if you read a book, that's not a "fair use" of the book. It is an unregulated use of the book, as reading does not produce a copy (except in the brain, but don't tell the lawyers).

But in cyberspace, there's no way to "use" a work without simultaneously making a "copy." In principle, and again, subject to fair use, any use of a work in cyberspace could be said to require permission first. And it is that feature (or bug, depending upon your perspective) that was the hook we used to get Creative Commons going.

The idea (again, stolen from the FSF) was to produce copyright licenses that artists, authors, educators, and researchers could use to announce to the world the freedoms that they want their creative work to carry. If the default rule of copyright is "all rights reserved," the express meaning of a Creative Commons license is that only "some rights [are] reserved." For example, copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make "copies" of his or her work. A Creative Commons license could, in effect, announce that this exclusive right was given to the public.

We launched Creative Commons in December, 2002. Within a year, we counted over 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. At a year and a half, that number was over 1,800,000. At two, the number was just about 5,000,000. At two and a half years (last June), the number was just over 12,000,000. And today -- three months later -- Yahoo! reports over 50,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. "Link-backs" are not really a count of how many objects are licensed under Creative Commons licenses - a single license could cover 100,000 songs in a music database for example, or a single blog might have multiple instances of the license. But the growth does measure something: The uptake of Creative Commons licenses is growing fast, and indeed, far faster than I ever dreamed." (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5661)

Lessig expands on the historical-legal context in "How it all began", at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5668

What is the key difference between the GPL and CC approaches

See our entry on the GNU General Public License

Michel Bauwens:

It helps to distinguish between different forms of sharing and purpose. There are many cases in which the individual need for expression and creative sharing is primary, and the commons is a derivative product of the individual creative process. In this case, the Creative Commons approach, which starts from a very strong position of the sovereignity of the individual, is appropropriate, and leaves the individual with a range of choices, many of which are not conducive to the creation of a strong Commons.

But there are other projects in which in individual consciously participates in a common project, such as Linux or the Wikipedia, where his contribution, even though it may correspond to an individual need, is clearly aimed at construction a Commons, which is therefore primary. In such a case, the GPL license is much more appropriate and conducive to the creation of a strong Commons.

Types of Creative Commons Licenses

Caveat from Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman (personal email, February 2007), writes that:

"There is no such thing as "the Creative Commons License". Creative Commons is a brand of license; that organization publishes many different licenses, which so different in their actual terms that it makes no sense to speak of them as a group. The widespread practice of talking about them as a group is extremely harmful. I urge people to avoid saying anything about "Creative Commons licenses" in general, and instead to speak about specific licenses only."

Lawrence Lessig explains

"Which freedoms the licenses offer is determined both by us (deciding which freedoms are important to secure through CC licenses) and by the creator who selects from the options we make available on our website. The basic components have historically been four: (1) Attribution (meaning the creator requires attribution as a condition of using his or her creative work), (2) NonCommercial (meaning the creator allows only noncommercial uses of his or her work), (3) No Derivatives (meaning the creator asks that the work be used as is, and not as the basis for something else), and (4) Share Alike (meaning any derivative you make using the licensed work must also be released under a Share Alike license).

These four options -- when each is an option -- produce 11 possible licenses. But when we saw that 98% of our adopters chose the "attribution" requirement, we decided to drop attribution as an option. That means we now offer 6 core licenses:

1. Attribution (use the work however you like, but give me attribution)

2. Attribution-ShareAlike (use the work however you like, but give me attribution, and license any derivative under a Share Alike license)

3. Attribution-NoDerivatives (use the work as is, and give me attribution)

4. Attribution-NonCommercial (use the work for noncommercial purposes, and give me attribution)

5. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (use the work for noncommercial purposes, as is, and with attribution)

6. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (use the work for noncommercial purposes, give me attribution, and license any derivative under a ShareAlike license" (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5661)

Other Licences of a similar nature

• See the GNU General Public License for a strong Commons-oriented license.

• The Free Art Licence is explained here, at http://artlibre.org/

A comparative graph of all licenses related to music, at http://www.musique-libre.com/, click on “Les licenses" or here at http://www.musique-libre.org/static.php?op=copyleftLicence.html&npds=-1 The philosophy of free music explained at http://www.free-music.com/freemus.htm ; the Open Music Registry, temporarily shut down in 2004, has announced a re-opening, see http://www.openmusicregistry.org/

• The Video Liberty project, at http://www.videoliberty.org/

• The Open Publication License, at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/

• The IANG License adds a number of transparency demands on the organization using creative material.

Critique on the Creative Commons licenses

Because of the length of this entry, we are publishing the criticims under a separate entry.

See Creative Commons - Critiques

More Information

Good summary of the different Creative Commons Licensing schemes and the legal concepts behind it, at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/ , http://creativecommons.org/about/legal/ . Common Content, http://commoncontent.org/, is an open catalog of Creative Commons content

A directory of CC-licensed content, Common Contents, http://commoncontent.org/

LegalTorrents, focuses on large files that can be downloaded with Bittorrent, at http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.htm

Some pro-CC advertorials to watch:

1. Building on the Past
2. Mix Tape