Noah Levin / Article Review: Creative Commons

Article Review: Creative Commons

Noah Levin / November 18th, 2008

Summary

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 as an initiative to promote collaboration of online creative works including: websites, music, film, photography, literature, artwork, etc,. We are currently living in the information age, where an exorbitant amount of content is being uploaded to the web on a daily basis. Whose to say who owns this content and more importantly, who can and cannot modify it, sell it, or use it for papers and projects. Well, when you create a work it is automatically protected by full copyright. Whether or not you file for protection or choose to display a copyright symbol, you are entitled to full coverage over your work [1]. Like almost any official government documentation, the written law for this coverage is unreadable by most people, and CC hopes to not only make it more accessible, but more useful for artists, writers, and the creative populous who wish to share their works to the public. Very much inline with the concept of open-source, CC strives to increase the raw source material online and make that material cheaper and easier to access.

The various forms of creative commons licenses have been adopted by over 200 major content directories with around 1 billion works using the CC licenses including: flickr, blip.tv, owl, spinxpress, google, yahoo [2]. Acquiring a license for your work is as easy as citing an html snippit on your website or blog, or sometimes just simply checking off a box if the site already supports CC licenses [3]. All of the CC licenses allow anyone to distribute, display or copy your work as long as they credit you or cite you in the way of your choosing. Here is an overview of each license, where a creator would choose the appropriate protections (or combinations of protections) based on how he/she intends the work to be used [4]:

Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
i.e. Someone requests to use your photograph on their website. You allow them as long as they clearly indicate your authorship.

Non-Commercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
i.e. You post a photograph on flickr. Someone prints your picture from the web, but they cannot sell the image without your consent.

No Derivative Works: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
i.e. You submit a poster design to deviantart.com. Someone downloads your poster, but cannot modify it for use it in a collage without your consent.

Share Alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. i.e. You allow a friend to modify and reuse your poster as long as they release their work under the same license (thereby allowing somewhat of a chain of cited works).

Public Domain: You release all control of your work to the public with no conditions whatsoever. i.e. You release a poster on your website and people modify it, sell it, or use it on their website without even needing to cite your authorship.

For those interested, creative commons does a great job explaining these licenses in more detail in a clever web comic [5].

Creative Commons is backed by multiple intellectual property specialists from all over the world and is now housed in San Francisco. They’ve gone as far as to make their licenses machine readable such that content that implements their licenses can be fished through search engines, thereby allowing quick and easy access to shared material and reducing potential barriers to creativity. In essence, CC provides an outlet for artists to feel comfortable sharing their work with the public in the hopes of inspiring and evolving future creative expressions; they offer a method of private rights that exclude complex political jargon to promote shared resources.

I’d like to end this summary by sharing a quote that I particularly enjoyed on Creative Common’s outlook of ‘Some Rights Reserved. I considered paraphrasing it, but for those of us who often read the thread starters and not the articles I thought it was better to do it justice by showing it here as it is a very moving explanation of CC’s take on copyright law:

“Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.”

Discussion

I first learned about Creative Commons when I started uploading my artwork to deviantart.com. I wondered about how my works were protected and how I would go about sharing them while still receiving credit. Within a few months of using deviantart and building somewhat of a reputation through the site, I actually encountered several incidents of people stealing my work (called ‘ripping’). I reported them through deviantart’s flagging system and got the works removed, and the administrators actually sent me a message thanking me for finding this abuse and pointed me to the creative commons website if I was passionate about learning more. This was back in 2003, and it seems that the support is only growing as Creative Common’s has since expanded to cover a series of projects designed to expand public domain including a science commons, an academic community, and a music remix website [6].

My experience of deviantart as it relates to CC may have been unique because the site promotes their own set of rules in addition to CC licenses. Although I felt better knowing that anyone can help moderate protected works and flag submissions on deviantart, I am unsure about how easy this would be when it comes to a random third party website. Creative commons allows for violations to be emailed to them provided you have enough evidence and clearly state your case and then are investigated, but I am still left to wonder how effective the licenses actually are. On that note:

How often do you think stolen creative works go unnoticed, and thereby not reported or flagged? Does it matter if only a small audience sees the work anyway?
Have any of you had any experience uploading artwork, photography, writing, or any other form of ‘creative work’ to the web with the intention of allowing others to use it in some way? If so, did you or do you trust people to follow proper usage of creative common licenses for your work? Were you ever approached by anyone asking to use your work?
Have any of you used someone else’s work from online in a school report or extra curricular project? If so, did you research the permissions of that content beforehand?
Creative Commons is founded under the belief that “innovation and new ideas come from building off existing ones.” [5] Do you feel this is true? Playing devils advocate, is it possible that adding licenses restricts people from building off existing works? Should all works be ‘public domain’?