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

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

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 small number of 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

Board

Technical Advisory Board

Audit Committee

Legal test case

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

See also: Creative Commons International

Projects using Creative Commons licenses

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

• 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 that 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 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).
• 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.
• That "it is not needed" or "it takes away user rights" (see Toth 2005 or Dvorak 2005).

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.
• Pragmazic - open-music store launched by the dogmazic team.
• 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
• CCMixter - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
• WYRR - A radio station that features Creative Commons music & allows listeners to download songs from its playlist.

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
• List of URLs of US gov photos]

See also

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

Footnotes

References

External links

• Creative Commons home page
• Creative Commons wiki
• Short Flash animation describing Creative Commons
• Creative Commons Explained: Lawrence Lessig on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos

Many of the licenses, notably all the original licenses, grant certain "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work without changes, at no charge. Some of the newer licenses do not grant these rights.

Creative Commons licenses are currently available in 43 different jurisdictions worldwide, with more than nineteen others under development. Licenses for jurisdictions outside of the United States are under the purview of Creative Commons International.

Original licenses

The original set of licenses all grant the "baseline rights". The details of each of these licenses depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

• Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
• Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
• ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.)

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. The five of the eleven valid licenses that lack the Attribution element have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website. There are thus six regularly used licenses:

1. Attribution alone (by)
2. Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
3. Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
4. Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
5. Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
6. Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

Works protected

Work licensed under a Creative Commons Licenses is protected by copyright applicable law. This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work protected by copyright law, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, websites.

However, the license may not modify the rights allowed by fair use or fair dealing or exert restrictions which violate copyright exceptions. Furthermore, Creative Commons Licenses are non-exclusive non-revocable. Any work or copies of the work obtained under a Creative Commons license may continue to be used under that license.

In the case of works protected by multiple Creative Common Licenses, the user may choose either.

Other licenses

A number of additional licenses have been introduced, which are more specialized:

• Sampling licenses, with two options:
• Sampling Plus - parts of the work can be copied and modified for any purpose other than advertising, and the entire work can be copied for noncommercial purposes
• Noncommercial Sampling Plus - the whole work or parts of the work can be copied and modified for noncommercial purposes

Besides licenses, Creative Commons also offers an easy way to release material into the public domain through the Public Domain Dedication, as well as Founder's Copyright, through which the work is released into the public domain after 14 or 28 years.

Retired licenses

Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses has since been retired, and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than the Public Domain Dedication, as well as two licenses not allowing non-commercial copying:

• Sampling – parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work can't be copied or modified
• DevNations – a Developing Nations license, which only applies to countries deemed by the World Bank as a "non-high-income economy". Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries.

Criticism

Debian

The maintainers of Debian GNU/Linux, a Linux distribution known for its adherence to software freedom, do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which could restrict private redistribution to some extent) and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author. As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licenses, so they can be compatible with the DFSG. As of July 2007, it remains to be seen if version 3 of the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses will be approved by Debian.

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation accepts the CC-BY v2.0 and the CC-BY-SA v2.0 Creative Commons licenses as being free, though not recommending it for software, but explains that it is vital to avoid the problem with the overly vague statement "I use a Creative Commons license" , without noting the actual license. Richard Stallman has criticised particular licenses for not allowing the freedom to make verbatim copies of the work for noncommercial purposes, and said that he no longer supported Creative Commons as an organisation, as the licenses no longer all had this freedom in common. Creative Commons have since retired these licenses, and no longer recommends their use.

Photographers

Ad controversy

The case hinges on privacy, the right of people not to have their likeness used in an ad without permission. So, while Mr. Wong may have given away his rights as a photographer, he did not, and could not, give away Alison's rights. In the lawsuit, which Mr. Wong is also a party to, there is an argument that Virgin did not honor all the terms of the nonrestrictive license.

See also

• BSD license
• Copyright
• Copyleft
• Free content
• Free software license
• GNU
• Open content
• Software licensing
• Non-commercial educational
• Creative Commons International

References

Bibliography

• Portions of this article are taken from the Creative Commons website, published under the Creative Commons Attribution License v1.0.

External links

• Full selection of licenses
• Creative Commons web site
• Creative Commons Licenses Compatibility Wizard
• Doctoral dissertations published under Creative Commons license
• Canadian Creative Commons web site