Creative Commons
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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.
Contents |
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 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 Wikipedia. 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 new Creative Commons licenses are written with the U.S. legal model in mind, and therefore the wording may not mesh perfectly with existing law in other countries. Using the U.S. model without regard to local law could render the licenses unenforceable, so the iCommons (International Commons) project intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. As of August 24, 2004, representatives from 21 countries and regions have joined this initiative.
Projects and works using Creative Commons licenses
Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. Common Content was set up by Jeff Kramer with cooperation from Creative Commons, and is currently maintained by volunteers.
Some of the best-known CC-licensed projects and works include:
- The fiction of Cory Doctorow
- Professor Lessig's 2004 book, Free Culture (the first CC-licensed book released by a major mainstream publisher, Penguin Books)
- Groklaw
- MIT OpenCourseWare - academic course syllabi
- Three of Eric S. Raymond's books, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the first complete and commercially released book under a CC license, published by O'Reilly & Associates), The New Hacker's Dictionary, and The Art of Unix Programming (all three with added proviso)
- Public Library of Science
- Star Wreck VI
- ccMixter A community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons
- Wikinews
Record labels
- LOCA Records
- Magnatune
- Opsound
- Small Brain Records
- Krayola Records
- Fading Ways Music
- Thinner/Autoplate
- OnClassical
Tools for discovering CC-licensed content
- iRATE radio
- Gnomoradio
- Yahoo! Creative Commons Search
- Common Content
- Jamendo - an archive of music albums under Creative Commons licenses
- The Assayer - a catalog of free/copylefted books
- Flickr Creative Commons search - photos on Flickr .
Criticisms of Creative Commons
- Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2005). Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement.
- Orlowski, Andrew (2005). On Creativity, Computers and Copyright. The Register.
- Tóth, Péter Benjamin. (2005). Creative Humbug: Personal feelings about the Creative Commons licenses
- Dvorak, John C. (2005. Creative Commons Humbug. PC Magazine
See also
- Copyleft
- List of works available under a Creative Commons License
- Creative Commons License
- Share-alike
- Science Commons
- rel-license
External links
- The creativecommons.org website
- A short Flash animation describing Creative Commons
- International Commons: Creative Commons initiatives outside the United States
- The Commons: The Commons as an Idea - Ideas as a Commons Article by David M. Berry about the commons and ideas
- BBC to Open Content Floodgates The BBC's Creative Archive project article in Wired
- Creative Commons: Let’s be creative together (Framasoft)
- Remix Group on Flickr - imaginative reuses of Creative Commons images
- Yahoo Creative Commons Search
- the Creative Commons Community
- "Take My Music ... Please" A Newsweek article about Creative Commons by Brian Braiker
- rel-license - used to indicate that a hyperlink to a license means the document is available under that license
- "Creative Commons Humbug" critical article in PC Magazine by John C. Dvorak
- "Creative Humbug" critical article by Péter Benjamin Tóth
- "Creative Humbug? Bah the humbug, let’s get creative!" reponse to the Tóth's criticism by Mia Garlick
- "Alternative Freedom" Documentary featuring Lawrence Lessig
References
- Ardito, Stephanie C. "Public-Domain Advocacy Flourishes." Information Today 20, no. 7 (2003): 17,19.
- Asschenfeldt, Christiane. "Copyright and Licensing Issues—The International Commons." In CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the Benefits of OAI (OAI3), 12 February-14 February 2004 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva: CERN, 2004. http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a035925&id=a035925s5t6/ video
- Brown, Glenn Otis. "Academic Digital Rights: A Walk on the Creative Commons." Syllabus Magazine (April 2003). http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7475
- ———. "Out of the Way: How the Next Copyright Revolution Can Help the Next Scientific Revolution." PLoS Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 30-31. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000009
- Chillingworth, Mark. "Creative Commons Attracts BBC's Attention." Information World Review, 11 June 2004. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155821
- Conhaim, Wallys W. "Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain." Information Today 19, no. 7 (2002): 52, 54. http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020603-2.htm
- "Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses." Cover Pages, 28 April 2004. http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-04-28-a.html
- Denison, D.C. "For Creators, An Argument for Alienable Rights." Boston Globe, 22 December 2002, E2.
- Ermert, Monika. "Germany Debuts Creative Commons." The Register, 15 June 2004. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/
- Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi. "Free Culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons." (2004). http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000122/
- Johnstone, Sally M. "Sharing Educational Materials Without Losing Rights." Change 35, no. 6 (2003): 49-51.
- Lessig, Lawrence. "The Creative Commons" (1994) vol.55 Florida Law Review 763.
- Plotkin, Hal. "All Hail Creative Commons: Stanford Professor and Author Lawrence Lessig Plans a Legal Insurrection." SFGate.com, 11 February 2002. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/11/creatcom.DTL
- Schloman, Barbara F. "Creative Commons: An Opportunity to Extend the Public Domain." Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 13 October 2003. http://www.nursingworld.org/ojin/infocol/info_12.htm
- Stix, Gary. "Some Rights Reserved." Scientific American 288, no. 3 (2003): 46. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=7&articleID=000C2691-4F88-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF
- Weitzman, Jonathan B., and Lawrence Lessig. "Open Access and Creative Common Sense." Open Access Now, 10 May 2004. http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=16
