   #copyright

Creative Commons

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Law

   Creative Commons
   Creative Commons logo
   Founder Lawrence Lessig
    Type   Non-profit organization
   Founded 2001
    Focus  Expansion of public domain information
   Method  Creative Commons licenses
   Website http://creativecommons.org/

   The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to
   expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to
   build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright
   licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending
   on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work.

Aim

   The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or
   all 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 owners can
   use when releasing their works on the Web. It also provides RDF/ XML
   metadata that describes the license and the work, making it easier to
   automatically process and locate licensed works. Creative Commons also
   provides a "Founders' Copyright" 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 what
   Creative Commons considers to be a dominant and increasingly
   restrictive permission culture. In the words of Lawrence Lessig,
   founder of Creative Commons and former Chairman of the Board, it is "a
   culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the
   powerful, or of creators from the past". Lessig maintains that modern
   culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to
   maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as
   popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide
   alternatives to these restrictions.

History

   Golden Nica Award for Creative Commons
   Golden Nica Award for Creative Commons

   The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication
   License 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 Open
   Publication License is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests
   that new projects not use it. Both licenses 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 former 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. The
   project itself was honored in 2004 with the Golden Nica Award at the
   Prix Ars Electronica, for the category "Net Vision".

   The Creative Commons was first tested in court in early 2006, when
   podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos without
   permission from his Flickr page. The photos were licensed under the
   Creative Commons NonCommercial license. While the verdict was in favour
   of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long
   as they did not repeat the offense. An analysis of the decision states,
   "The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it
   confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license
   automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of
   such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge
   of, the conditions of the license."

   On December 15, 2006, Professor Lessig retired as chair and appointed
   Joi Ito as the new chair, in a ceremony which took place in Second
   Life.

Localization

   The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with
   the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording could be incompatible
   within different local legislations and render the licenses
   unenforceable in various jurisdictions. To address this issue, Creative
   Commons International has started to port the various licenses to
   accommodate local copyright and private law. As of January 2007, there
   are 34 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with 9 other jurisdictions in
   drafting process, and more countries joining the project.

Projects 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.

Sampling of CC adoption scope

   This list provides a short sampling of CC-licensed projects which
   convey the breadth and scope of Creative Commons adoption among
   prominent institutions and publication modes.

   Portals, aggregation, and archives

          Flickr, Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Ourmedia,
          deviantART, ccMixter

   Formal publications

          Public Library of Science, Proceedings of Science, Sino-Platonic
          Papers

   Instructional materials

          MIT OpenCourseWare, Clinical Skills Online, MIMA Music

   Collaborative content

          Wikinews, Wikitravel, Memory Alpha, Uncyclopedia, Jurispedia,
          Microsoft Developer Network, Open Architecture Network and many
          other wikis

   Blogs, Videoblogs, and Podcasts

          Groklaw, This Week in Tech, : Rocketboom, Jet Set Show,
          newspaperindex

   Journalism

          20 minutes newspaper

   Cartography

          OpenStreetMap

   Progressive culture

          Jamendo, BeatPick, Revver, GarageBand.com, blip.tv

   Counterculture

          Star Wreck

   Movies

          Elephants Dream

   Bumper stickers

          Bumperactive

   Porn

          The Good Girl

Notable works

     * Professor Lessig's 2004 electronic version of the book Free
       Culture. (The printed version of the book, however, was published
       under a restrictive licence.)
     * Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
       Transforms Markets and Freedom
     * Dan Gillmor's We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People,
       for the People
     * The fiction of Cory Doctorow
     * Three of Eric S. Raymond's books (although with some added
       restrictions): 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
     * Teach, a 2001 short film directed by Davis Guggenheim.
     * Cactuses, a 2006 full-length dramatic movie.
     * Elephants Dream, a 2006 CG short film created with free/
       open-source software
     * mariposaHD, the first original HDTV series made for the Internet.

Record labels

     * BeatPick
     * LOCA Records
     * Magnatune
     * OnClassical
     * Opsound
     * Kahvi Collective
     * Small Brain Records
     * Krayola Records
     * Jamendo
     * Thinner/ Autoplate
     * Comfort Stand Recordings

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

     * Creative Commons' Search Page
     * Yahoo's Creative Commons Search
     * Common Content
     * Mozilla Firefox web browser with default Creative Commons search
       functionality
     * The Internet Archive - Project dedicated to maintaining an archive
       of multimedia resources, among which Creative Commons-licensed
       content
     * Ourmedia - Media archive supported by the Internet Archive
     * ccHost - Server web software used by ccmixter and Open Clip Art
       Library

Audio and Music

     * Electrobel Community - More than 10,000 electronic music songs
       released under one of the CC licences.
     * iRATE radio
     * Adrenalinic Sound - Italy
     * Gnomoradio
     * BeatPick A creative commons music licensing site
     * Jamendo - An archive of music albums under Creative Commons
       licenses
     * CC:Mixter - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
     * Date a Conocer - A Spanish archive of music under Creative Commons
       licenses

Photos and images

     * Everystockphoto.com - Search engine and member bookmarking for
       Creative Commons Photos
     * Open Clip Art Library

Criticism

   During its first year as an organization, Creative Commons experienced
   a "honeymoon" period with very little criticism. Recently though,
   critical attention has focused on the Creative Commons movement and how
   well it is living up to its perceived values and goals. The critical
   positions taken can be roughly divided up into complaints of a lack of:
     * An ethical position - Those in these camps criticize the Creative
       Commons for failing to set a minimum standard for its licenses, or
       for not having an ethical position to base its licenses. These
       camps argue that Creative Commons should define, and should have
       defined, a set of core freedoms or rights which all CC licenses
       must grant. These terms might, or might not, be the same core
       freedoms as the heart of the free software movement. In particular,
       Richard Stallman has criticised the newer licenses for not allowing
       the freedom to copy the work for noncommercial purposes, and has
       said he no longer supports Creative Commons as an organisation, as
       the licenses no longer provide this as a common basic freedom.
     * A political position - Where the object is to critically analyze
       the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an
       eminent 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).

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
