Revision as of 07:46, 20 January 2008

Creative Commons

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

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.

You can also read this Introduction to Creative Commons Licenses.

Description

Compiled by Joi Ito at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/06/23/interview_for_macedonian_newspaper.html

1. What is Creative Commons license?

From the website: http://creativecommons.org/about/think

How does a Creative Commons license operate?

Creative Commons license are based on copyright. So it applies to all works that are protected by copyright law. The kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings, for example. Software programs are also protected by copyright but, as explained below, we do not recommend that you apply a Creative Commons license to software code or documentation.

Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate how others may exercise your copyright rights—such as the right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make money from your work. They do not give you the ability to restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or limitations to copyright—including, importantly, fair use or fair dealing—nor do they give you the ability to control anything that is not protected by copyright law, such as facts and ideas.

Creative Commons licenses attach to the work and authorize everyone who comes in contact with the work to use it consistent with the license. This means that if Bob has a copy of your Creative Commons-licensed work, Bob can give a copy to Carol and Carol will be authorized to use the work consistent with the Creative Commons license. You then have a license agreement separately with both Bob and Carol.

Creative Commons licenses are expressed in three different formats: the Commons Deed (human-readable code), the Legal Code (lawyer-readable code); and the metadata (machine readable code). You don’t need to sign anything to get a Creative Commons license—just select your license at our ‘Publish’ page.

One final thing you should understand about Creative Commons licenses is that they are all non-exclusive. This means that you can permit the general public to use your work under a Creative Commons license and then enter into a separate and different non-exclusive license with someone else, for example, in exchange for money.

2. Can you explain the concept of CC?

From the website:

http://creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.

http://creativecommons.org/license/

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. When you choose a license, we provide you with tools and tutorials that let you add license information to your own site, or to one of several free hosting services that have incorporated Creative Commons.

3. I have a blog. Why should I use CC license?

If you do not use a Creative Commons license, it is not clear to people reading your blog what rights they have to reuse your work. Other than "fair use" or other narrow uses permitted under the laws of various countries, people will have to ask specific permission to reuse photos, text and screenshots of your blog. With a Creative Commons license, people can know if they can use things from your blog without asking permission. The CC license also stipulates that they must give you attribution so that when they use things from your blog, they are required to put your name on it.

For most bloggers who are looking for an audience and to join the conversation, allowing people to use your work and share your knowledge increases the likely hood that you would be quoted on other blogs. If you choose the most liberal license, CC-BY that allows commercial reuse, you are more likely to show up in a newspaper, magazine or TV show. As a blogger, you should weight the "cost" to you of someone using your work in a commercial way, with the attention you would receive by being shown on TV, etc.

Many main stream media publications already quote and use material blogs without permission, but CC allows them (and non-commercial users like bloggers) to know your intent which is important for the ethical and legally conscious sites and shows." (http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/06/23/interview_for_macedonian_newspaper.html)

How is CC different from Copyright?

"CC builds upon copyright and doesn't replace it. CC licenses are licenses that use copyright law in various countries to describe how people want to share, very similar to how open source software licenses use copyright to make software shareable." ((http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/06/23/interview_for_macedonian_newspaper.html))

Origin and History

1.

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)

2.

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

3.

Alan Toner [1]:

“For example I’d argue that as soon as it became clear that the gate-keeping role of distributors of cultural works was in crisis, it became obvious to many people that there was an opportunity for many other cultural producers to get a part of the limelight, and that this would necessarily take place on terms which were different to those traditionally imposed by the cultural industries. Standard copyright provisions in this sense represent the inherited form of industrial regulation, designed by and for those with a stake in the old organization of cultural production. Lawyers of course wondered how they might manufacture themselves a role as advisers on rights issues, and offering an a la carte menu specifying permissions and reserved rights was an obvious way to do it. I know this because the idea occurred to me, too. So something like CC was always going to be born, it is a child of its time, a zeitgeist.

There is also a more historically specific and contingent aspect to all this. CC is Larry Lessig’s project to a significant extent, and has been the locomotive of his own views which are wide-ranging and not limited to the field of copyright. Co-founder James Boyle, for example, appears puzzlingly AWOL when it comes to ideologically contextualizing CC. CC came into the world after Larry’s defeat in the Eldred case and many years spent pushing a narrowly legalistic agenda, whose objective had been to persuade nine supreme court judges to adopt a conservative scheme of interpretation to overturn the legislature’s capitulation to Hollywood lobbying embodied in amongst other laws the Sonny Bono Copyright Term extension Act. By 2000, failure in court had called time on this strategy and it was time for a new one. Lessig confessed his errors in Free Culture and moved on: CC was the result. In addition 1999 had seen the explosion of p2p onto the landscape of legal conflict, and it was clear that somewhere down the road there would be a challenge to these technologies under one or another theory of secondary liability for copyright infringement. In such a situation it would be necessary to demonstrate that these technologies had substantial non-infringing uses. The last time a major case was fought on this issue involved the video cassette recorder in Sony v Betamax, where the fact that there existed some producers of broadcast television materials which did not object to copying, and some uses - “time-shifting” materials for later viewing - considered legitimate, cumulatively brought the technology within a space where it was allowed to exist even if it could be used for purposes infringement.

Millions of people are today using CC licenses that permit the reproduction of their ‘content’, such that any means of digital communication can have a significant non-infringing use. If one is searching for an instrumental explanation for the establishmnet of CC, I think this is it.” (http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/an-anarchist-gema/)

Discussion

A commons for consumers or a commons for creators?

(key underlying argument: using the non-commercial feature basically excludes creators from using the commons)

Alan Toner:

“Two divergent and clashing conceptions in the use of CC licenses become evident.

The first employs them as instruments designed to guarantee access.The ‘commons’ that this model aspires towards is one based only on consumption. Universal reception is approved but all other rights are reserved, especially control over context and reuse. Only non-commercial use is permitted. Sometimes no derivative works are allowed due to a desire to protect the integrity of the text or video.

The second focuses on amassing a large stock of common materials for whose use no-one’s permission is required. The fear of commercial appropriation is put aside for the hope of contaminatory insinuation into the mainstream thus integration with commercial products is permitted. But all new (derivative) works must be available to be used themselves - it’s the GPL for culture and it relies upon the sharealike clause - I share if you share.

Thus the potential emerges for a material base of raw materials that can be continually reworked, improved upon and exploited in any number of ways. Contributors are assured that their work will not be appropriated unilaterally. Other works infected by sharealike become collective resource and a form of indirect income like free transport, access to education and housing. At a moment of both generalised precarization and restraints on expression it provides a rare guarantee.” (http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2007/02/17/a-commons-for-creators-or-consumers/)

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.

What are the prospects for its uptake by industry players?

Joi Ito at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/06/23/interview_for_macedonian_newspaper.html

"How do Hollywood and other major industries accept CC?

There is a mixed response. I think that because the core values of CC involve Free Culture, I think that often this is misinterpreted to mean anti-copyright. In fact CC is not anti-copyright. It is just asking to allow artists to make choices based on what they would like to do.

I think that the enlightened people in the industry know, like and use CC. Some have even begun to understand the commercial benefit of using CC for marketing lesser know artists or for promotion already well know artists. I think that as new business models that involve sharing evolve, people will find that sharing actually makes business sense.

I think that we are struggling to make this case because for most people any change is frightening and disruptive. I am confident, however, that we will wind the hearts and minds of most people in Hollywood.

A good example is the Internet. Initially the Internet (or TCP/IP) was at odds with what most of the worlds companies and standards bodies wanted to do. it was considered rogue and illegal in some countries. Pushing the Internet was a political statement. Now everyone uses it. Some people would like to make it more closed and some of us fight to keep it open, but for the most part, people see its value and realize now that open is better than closed. I think that CC might follow a similar path." (http://joi.ito.com/archives/2007/06/23/interview_for_macedonian_newspaper.html)

Does CC-based Open Publishing underminde existing media communities?

From a controversy in the Sivacracy blog, by Tarleton Gillespie [2]:

Summary of the challenge:

"people trade music one peer-to-peer networks with no concern for paying the artist; that works now, since all this music has already been released — but what happens when artists stop producing music altogether because it is being redistributed, and fans are left with nothing to trade? Or, political blogging claims to be an improvement over mainstream media, avoiding lots of the problems that commercial and institutional imperatives force on the old form — but blogging rarely includes investigative inquiry or breaking news, its really about recirculation, commentary, critical analysis, so what happens if the mainstream news collapses, what will bloggers comment on?"

The reply:

"These concerns are, I believe, unwarranted because they are too stark: there are lots of reasons why musicians will continue to make music and journalists will continue to investigate, even in a context in which users now eagerly take, recirculate, and comment on their work. But Price’s concern is a sharper one: does the value of community, the way people gather around a site like openDemocracy, fuel the continued production of its content, and its sense of significance? (This has echoes of Benjamin’s worry about the loss of “aura” when cultural works can be easily reproduced.) If those materials can be found outside of its designed context, whether its on another site or through aggregators like Google News or RSS readers, will those communities wither? As price puts it,

The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.

What Price underestimates is the “attribution” aspect of the Creative Commons license, and of this context of abundance more generally. Communities can’t just hunker down and survive, they need to grow and remain vital. They do this by expanding their reach, finding new members while also serving the old, connecting to other conversations and deepening them. The fact that openDemocracy’s articles get picked up and re-posted on other sites, or made available out of context through Google News, not only gets them to more people, it directs some of those readers back to the site, where some of them may become members themselves. The link back to openDemocracy, through attribution and through a literal hyperlink, is a kind of advertising, a kind of invitation, a kind of enticement. It’s actually better than an ad, because rather than being told “you really should check out our site, it’s good, I swear” a reader finds value in an article, and has reason to seek out more. Just as some musicians will continue to make music, even if there is no profit for them, and just as some journalists will seek out information even if there is no financial reward coming to them, communities will continue to form around shared value and meaning. The porous boundaries of these communities is always valuable and risky, and every community struggles with how porous to be. But allowing the content itself to circulate strikes me as the most powerful way to make a community open, strong, viable, and lively." (http://www.sivacracy.net/archives/004344.html)

True Open Access means Derivative Usage must be allowed

Catriona J. MacCallum:

"with this welcome trend comes a more insidious one to obscure the true meaning of open access by confusing it with free access. As the original Bethesda definition makes clear, open access allows for unrestricted derivative use; free access does not. So the beauty of open-access publishing is not just that you can download and read an article for personal use. You can also redistribute it, make derivative copies of it. This is because the open-access license most commonly used—the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)—permits derivative reuse, as long as the author is correctly cited and attributed for the work. It is the most liberal of the available Creative Commons licenses (there are six), which are now applied widely to books, music, videos, etc., as well as scholarly works. It is important to note that of the six different Creative Commons licenses, only those that permit unrestricted derivative use (which may be limited to noncommercial use) truly equate with open access. (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285)

Some Additional Issues

Sudhir Suyal [3]:

"Hang on a minute. So these licenses mean that all content is actually given away free and the content creators are still making money out of it?

Yes, believe it or not, it's true. The common phenomenon is that, once an interest is generated around a product freely available on the internet, a large proportion of those who use the content on the internet, move over to a retail store and actually pay for the same content in a physical form.

The reasons are manifold, some buy it for purposes of convenience, other do so to show their respect for the content creators, while still others buy it because of their perception of value in buying a product they can touch, feel and put on their rack. More than anything, the content available freely on the web helps build hype and WOM (Word of Mouth) attention onto the content, which more often than not translates into sales.

There are a number of content creators which have used this strategy and come out successful; you can read more about them here and here.

Has anyone taken these licenses seriously? Have legal bodies given them recognition?

Well, the best way to answer that question is to tell you about an incident which happened recently. Well known podcaster Adam Curry, was shocked to see one morning a collection of photos from his Flickr page appear without his permission in the Dutch Tabloid 'Weekend Magazine'. The license for all his content on Flickr being a non-commercial Creative Commons license meant that any commercial use of his photographs was strictly disallowed and his permission would have to be sought if it were to be used.

The case went to the Dutch Courts, and Curry won.

The tabloid was warned, with the ruling clearly stating that moving forward, the tabloid would be fined a sum of 1000 Euros for every photo they were to use without his permission. An analysis of the decision states that, "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."

This was a victory for the Creative Commons movement. Their belief and faith in the movement had been vindicated.

Given the recent nature of this phenomenon, and the unstructured new media laws in most countries, it's still unclear how Creative Commons licenses will be upheld in other countries, only time will perhaps give us that answer.

Where have these licenses been used since their launch?

Since its launch, the response has been dramatic with a number of blogs, photos, videos and other creative content being licensed with the Creative Commons licenses. Some of the notable projects which have been CC Licensed have been popular internet platforms such as Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, while other formal publications and instructional materials such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the Public Library of Science have been others who have labeled their content with CC Licenses.

The movement has seen itself extend to other forms of media such as newspapers, magazines, blogs and record labels apart from open space films such as Elephants Dream and Cactuses ." (http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2007/10/spicyip-guest-series-sudhir-syal-on.html)

Review of the Critiques

Sudhir Suyal:

"Some of the common points of criticism have been:

An Ethical position – Many have criticized the Creative Commons organization for not having an ethical position to base its licenses. Proponents of the Free Software Movement have argued that many of the CC Licenses have instead of providing more freedom to content creators, actually served as a hindrance. The Creative Commons organization reacted by retiring some of those specific licenses.

A Political position – Many who have examined the group have completely disregarded its relevance, potency and effectiveness describing the group as an unconcerned corporate filter serving more to feed all those participating into corporate co-option with no specific motive.

A Pro-Copyright position - The content industry as a whole has said that the Creative Commons Licenses in general undermine copyright laws showing utter disrespect for the media industry at large. Further, they have criticized the movement saying that instead of simplifying license proliferation, they have worsened it by providing that are incompatible with most forms of media.

A paper by Niva Elkin Koren , a professor of law at the University of Haifa Israel, forms a an alternative view on Creative Commons, presenting her hypothesis on how instead of opening out a new world of creative thinking and freedom, the movement might actually inadvertently create more of a restrictive licensing culture because of the easy accessibility to licenses. Her view is that, since most creative content is actually devoid of copyright licensing in any case, the Creative Commons licenses are in most cases giving creative content new licenses and restrictions which previously did not exist." (http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2007/10/spicyip-guest-series-sudhir-syal-on.html)

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

See also this critique by Free Software Magazine: A Commons without Commonolatity

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/

Study on actual usage of licenses, at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html

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

Some pro-CC advertorials to watch:

Creative Commons: Difference between revisions