IDEA No 64
CREATIVE COMMONS
Folk hero Woody Guthrie wrote in the 1940s: ‘This song is copyrighted in US for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’
While not all rights owners are quite as generous, there are varying degrees to which people wish to protect their work. Intellectual property laws are usually black and white – you either retain or relinquish copyright. Motivated by the introduction of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Eric Eldred, Lawrence Lessig and Hal Abelson decided that there must be a middle way.
Eldred, Lessig and Abelson formed the Creative Commons (CC) organization, with the aim of creating copyright licenses that embrace the collaborative spirit of the Web. Creative Commons builds on the work of Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, founded in 1983 (see Open Source). It applies similar principles to work beyond software and offers a variety of licences. With these licences, rights are retained but additional permissions are granted to allow others to share, adapt and, in certain circumstances, even sell the work. The six different licences give creators more choice in how freely others might use their work.
Despite protests from intellectual rights campaigners, who claim that its licences cloud copyright issues, Creative Commons clarifies the situation for many. The ‘copyleft’ licences, and their associated icons, are easy to understand and implement. They replace the individual negotiations necessary under an ‘all rights reserved’ system with a ‘some rights reserved’ arrangement.
This new way of sharing and distributing work had a huge kick start when it was adopted by the photo-sharing site Flickr. Wikipedia followed, and there are now approaching a billion CC licences in use. Creative Commons also has the backing of influential – and perhaps surprising – supporters, such as Microsoft and Google. Microsoft Office has an add-in that allows users to embed Creative Commons licences directly into Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, while Google incorporates a search for CC-licensed documents and images.
There is a way to go, but perhaps it is only a matter of time before everyone thinks Creative Commons first, copyright second.■
