Leena Marsh

Creative Commons is a non-profit organizationworking to increase the amount of creativity inthe commons.

“the commons— the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use,

repurposing, and remixing”http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc

What is it?

• Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright (all rights reserved) and the public domain (no rights reserved)

• It is not an alternative for copyright• CC licences allow creators to retain copyright,

while inviting certain uses of the work, a "some rights reserved" copyright

History

• Housed at Stanford Law School• Started by legal, academic and business

specialists in cyberlaw/IP, computer science, documentary filmmaking and public domain web-publishing

• Aimed at developing content, web sites and applications rather than programming

• 2001- Creative Commons founded

• 2002- Version 1.0 licenses released

• 2003 -Approximately 1 million licenses in use

• 2004 -Estimated 4.7 million licensed works

Version 2.0 released

• 2005- Estimated 20 million works

Version 2.5 released

• 2006- Estimated 50 million licensed works

• 2007- Estimated 90 million licensed works

Version 3.0 released

• 2008- Estimated 130 million CC licensed works

New Nine Inch Nails album released under CC

• 2009- CC0 launched

Who uses CC?

Nine Inch Nails: The Slip Album

Cover

Open Source and CC

• Open source and CC have one main thing in common:

Both aim to increase the amount of creativity available online

CC Licence Elements

• Attribution: The work is made available to the public with the baseline rights, but the author must receive full credit

• Non-commercial: The work can be copied, displayed and distributed by the public, but only if these actions are for non-commercial purposes

• No derivative works: This licence grants baseline rights, but it does not allow derivative works to be created from the original

• Share-Alike: Derivative works can be created and distributed based on the original, but only if the same type of licence is used, which generates a “viral” licence

The 6 main CC Licences

by Attribution

by-nc Attribution-NonCommercial

by-sa Attribution-Share Alike

by-nd Attribution-No Derivatives

by-nc-sa Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike

by-nc-nd Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives

Other Types of licence

• Sampling licence– Sampling– Sampling Plus: – Non-Commercial Sampling Plus

• Public Domain Dedication• Founders Copyright• Music Sharing licence• Developing Nations licence• Creative Commons also recommends two open source

software licences for those licensing software– GNU General Public licence– GNU Lesser Public licence

The Licence

Licence Formats• Commons deed

(human readable)

• Legal licence (lawyer readable)

• RDF/XMLMachine readable

Licence Metadata• Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata is used in the

machine readable licence• You can also embed metadata in RSS, Audio (MP3 and Ogg), XMP

(PDF, image formats), SMIL• Can embed non-web data• You can embed metadata using CC tools e.g. in MP3s using

ccPublisher

Accrediting Use• The proper way to accredit use of CC-licensed work is to:

– to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work– credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki

or journal) in the manner they specify– Include the title of the Work– the Uniform Resource Identifier for the work if specified by the

author and/or licensor

International CC• CC licences originally written using an American legal model• The licences were popular and adopted by users all around the

world• However, there was a possibility that there might be validity

problems in some jurisdictions• iCommons :

– 24 jurisdictions have completed licences (17/11/05)– 13 jurisdictions licences are being developed – at least 70 local jurisdiction licenses expected

CC United Kingdom• Complexities of UK law have meant the creation of two different set

of licences• CC United Kingdom: England and Wales

– Licence ported by Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University

• CC United Kingdom: Scotland– Licence being ported by the AHRB Centre for Studies in

Intellectual Property and Technology Law at Edinburgh University

• Also CC Ireland– Creative Commons is working to create Ireland jurisdiction

Other CC Work• Science Commons• CC Conservancy - land trust for intellectual work • Tools - CC Publisher, CC lookup, browser plugins• Searching• Weblog and mailing lists• Fundraising• Features on relevant artists

The CC Web site

http://creativecommons.org/http://creativecommons.org/

Pros of CC

Pros:• allows the artist to determine the ways in

which other people can use their work• can be difficult on internet to ask permission

of artist to use their work- CC license speeds up the permissions process

• Protection from copyright infringement –CC license can be used to help prove your authorship

Cons of CC

• Once you publish a work under a CC license you can't change your mind. You can however create another license for the same work under a new licence.

• No checks involved to manage CC licenses• Implication that the CC supersedes the

copyrights law

References

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

• http://creativecommons.org/• http://jocalling.blogspot.com/2007/08/

creative-commons-pros-and-cons.html• http://www.idealware.org/blog/2008/12/

creative-commons-turns-six.html• http://www.pcmag.com/

article2/0,2817,1838244,00.asp

Any Questions?