The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.
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 Resource Description Framework (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' [1] 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 the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture pervading modern society; a culture pressed hard upon society by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema.
History[]
The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License (OPL) 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 Basilicus. The OPL is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects not use it. Both the OPL and the GFDL 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.
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. [2] The project was honored with the Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica in the category "Net Vision" in 2004.
Localization[]
The non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal model 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 November 30, 2005, representatives from 46 countries and regions have joined this initiative, and licenses for 24 of those countries have already been completed.
Criticisms of Creative Commons[]
With its world-wide success and early honeymoon period, inevitably there has been a more critical attention focussed on the Creative Commons movement and how well it is living up to its perceived values. The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into the following types:
- An Ethical or Moralistic position leveled by some members of the Free Software community - Those in these camps either cricticize the fact that Creative Commons fails to follow the model of other social movements (including the Free Software or Open Source movements) by failing to define any clear set of values or "unreservable" rights or that Creative Commons makes it easy for authors to reserve particular rights that critics believe should be unreservable (e.g. See Benjamin Mako 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).