Creative Commons

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of

creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.[1] The organization has
released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to
the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and
which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand
one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each
Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are
based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright
owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright
management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses
for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The
result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, profiting both
copyright owners and licensees. Wikipedia uses one of these

licenses.[2]

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred[3]
with the support of Center for the Public Domain. The first article in a general interest
publication about Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in February

Creative Commons

Founded 2001
Founder

Lawrence Lessig

Type

501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Focus

Expansion of "reasonable", flexible

copyright

Method

Creative Commons license

Key
people

Ryan Merkley, CEO

Website

creativecommons.org
(https://creativecommons.org)

2002.[4] The first set of copyright licenses was released in December 2002.[5] The founding
management team that developed the licenses and built the Creative Commons infrastructure as we know it today included Molly Shaffer Van
Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida.[6] Matthew Haughey and Aaron Swartz[7] also played a significant role in the
early stages of the project. As of November 2014 there were an estimated 880 million works licensed under the various Creative Commons
licenses.[8] As of March 2015, Flickr alone hosts over 306 million Creative Commons licensed photos.[9] Creative Commons is governed by a
board of directors. Their licenses have been embraced by many as a way for creators to take control of how they choose to share their
copyrighted works.

Contents
1 Aim and influence

2 Governance
3 Affiliate network
3.1 South Korea
3.2 Bassel Khartabil
4 Criticism
4.1 License proliferation and incompatibility
4.2 License misuse
4.3 Criticism of the non-commercial license
5 See also
6 References
7 Bibliography
8 External links

Aim and influence

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer
public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, and has been dubbed "some rights reserved."[10]
David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to
the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical
and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely."[11]
Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a dominant and increasingly
restrictive permission culture. Lessig describes this as "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of
creators from the past".[12] 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.[13][14]

Governance

As of 2015, the Board of Creative Commons consists of:[15]

Hal Abelson
Ben Adida
Renata Avila
Paul Brest, Chair
Michael W. Carroll
Dorothy Gordon
Paul Keller
Ryan Merkley, CEO
Diane Peters, Corporate Secretary
Laurie Racine
Thomas Rubin

Golden Nica Award (2004)

Eric Saltzman
Chris Sprigman
Christopher Thorne
Molly Van Houweling
Esther Wojcicki, Vice Chair
Jongsoo Yoon

The Advisory Board consists of:[15]

Lawrence Lessig (2008)

Creative Commons Japan Seminar,

Tokyo (2007)

John Abele
Catherine Casserly
Brian Fitzgerald
Sue Gardner
Spencer Hyman

CC some rights reserved

Joi Ito
Lawrence Lessig (emeritus)
Mohamed Nanabhay
Annette Thomas
Jimmy Wales
CC's Audit Committee has three members, who are also members of the Board. As of 2015, they are Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman and Chris
Sprigman.

Affiliate network
As of 2015, there are more than 100 affiliates working in over 75 jurisdictions to support and promote
CC activities around the world.[16]

South Korea
Creative Commons Korea (CC Korea) is the affiliated network of Creative Commons in South
Korea. In March 2005, CC Korea was initiated by Jongsoo Yoon (in Korean: ), a Presiding
Judge of Incheon District Court, as a project of Korea Association for Infomedia Law (KAFIL). The
major Korean portal sites, including Daum and Naver, have been participating in the use of Creative
Commons licences. In January 2009, the Creative Commons Korea Association was consequently
founded as a non-profit incorporated association. Since then, CC Korea has been actively promoting the
liberal and open culture of creation as well as leading the diffusion of Creative Commons in the
country.

A sign in a pub in Granada notifies

customers that the music they are
listening to is freely distributable
under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons Korea[17]

Creative Commons Asia Conference 2010[18]

Bassel Khartabil
Bassel Khartabil is a Palestinian Syrian open source software developer and has served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative
Commons Syria.[19] Since March 15, 2012 he has been detained by the Syrian government in Damascus at Adra Prison.

Criticism
All current CC licenses (except the CC0 Public Domain Dedication tool) require attribution, which can be inconvenient for works based on
multiple other works.[20] Critics feared that Creative Commons could erode the copyright system over time[21] or allow "some of our most
precious resources the creativity of individuals to be simply tossed into the commons to be exploited by whomever has spare time and a
magic marker."[22]
Critics also worried that the lack of rewards for content producers will dissuade artists from publishing their work, and questioned whether
Creative Commons is the commons that it purports to be.[23]

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig countered that copyright laws have not always offered the strong and seemingly indefinite
protection that today's law provides. Rather, the duration of copyright used to be limited to much shorter terms of years, and some works never
gained protection because they did not follow the now-abandoned compulsory format.[24]
The maintainers of Debian, a GNU and Linux distribution known for its rigid adherence to a particular definition of software freedom,[25]
rejected the Creative Commons Attribution License prior to version 3 as incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due
to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which might, due to ambiguity, be covering more than DRM) and its requirement that downstream users
remove an author's credit upon request from the author.[26] Version 3.0 of the Creative Commons licenses addressed these concerns[27] and is
considered to be compatible with the DFSG.[28]

License proliferation and incompatibility

Mako Hill asserted that Creative Commons fails to establish a "base level of freedom" that all Creative Commons licenses must meet, and with
which all licensors and users must comply. "By failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the sand, CC is a missed
opportunity.... CC has replaced what could have been a call for a world where 'essential rights are unreservable' with the relatively hollow call
for 'some rights reserved.' " He also argued that Creative Commons worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are
incompatible.[29]
The Creative Commons website states, "Since each of the six CC licenses functions differently, resources placed under different licenses may
not necessarily be combined with one another without violating the license terms."[30] Works licensed under incompatible licenses may not be
recombined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.[31][32][33]
Richard Stallman of the FSF stated in 2005 that he couldnt support Creative Commons as an activity because "it adopted some additional
licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom", that freedom being "the freedom to share, noncommercially, any published
work".[34] Those licenses have since been "retired" by Creative Commons.

License misuse
Creative Commons is only a service provider for standardized license text, not a party in any agreement. Abusive users can brand the
copyrighted works of legitimate copyright holders with Creative Commons licenses and re-upload these works to the internet. No central
database of Creative Commons works is controlling all licensed works and the responsibility of the Creative Commons system rests entirely
with those using the licences.[35] This situation is, however, not specific to Creative Commons. All copyright owners must individually defend
their rights and no central database of copyrighted works or existing license agreements exists. The United States Copyright Office does keep a
database of all works registered with it, but absence of registration does not imply absence of copyright.

Although Creative Commons offers multiple licenses for different uses, some critics suggested that the licenses still do not address the
differences among the media or among the various concerns that different authors have.[23]
Lessig wrote that the point of Creative Commons is to provide a middle ground between two extreme views of copyright protectionone
demanding that all rights be controlled, and the other arguing that none should be controlled. Creative Commons provides a third option that
allows authors to pick and choose which rights they want to control and which they want to grant to others. The multitude of licenses reflects
the multitude of rights that can be passed on to subsequent creators.[24]

Criticism of the non-commercial license

Erik Mller raised concerns about the use of Creative Commons' non-commercial license. Works
distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license are not compatible with many opencontent sites, including Wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Mller
explained that "the people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but
small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers."[36]
Lessig responded that the current copyright regime also harms compatibility and that authors can lessen
this incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license.[37] Additionally, the non-commercial
license is useful for preventing someone else from capitalizing on an author's work when the author still
plans to do so in the future.[37][38] The non-commercial licenses have also been criticized for being too

Creative Commons guiding the

contributors. This image is a
derivative work of Liberty Leading
the People by Eugne Delacroix.

vague about which uses count as "commercial" and "non-commercial".[39][40]

See also
Free culture movement
Open access
Open content
Open source

References
1. "Frequently Asked Questions" (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ). Creative Commons. Retrieved 20 December 2011.

1. "Frequently Asked Questions" (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ). Creative Commons. Retrieved 20 December 2011.

2. "Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use" (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use). Retrieved June 11, 2012.
3. "Creative Commons: History" (http://creativecommons.org/about/history). Retrieved 2011-10-09.
4. Plotkin, Hal (2002-2-11) (11 February 2002). "All Hail Creative Commons Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig plans a legal insurrection"
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2002/02/11/creatcom.DTL). SFGate.com. Retrieved 2011-03-08.
5. "History of Creative Commons" (http://creativecommons.org/about/history/). Retrieved 2009-11-08.
6. Haughey, Matt (2002-09-18). "Creative Commons Announces New Management Team" (http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3483).
creativecommons.org. Retrieved 2013-05-07.
7. Lessig, Lawrence (2013-01-12). "Remembering Aaron Swartz" (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/36298). creativecommons.org. Retrieved
2013-05-07.
8. "State of the Commons" (https://stateof.creativecommons.org/report/). Retrieved 2015-03-15.
9. "Explore Creative Commons" (https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons). Flickr. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
10. Broussard, Sharee L. (September 2007). "The copyleft movement: creative commons licensing"
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7081/is_3_26/ai_n28457434?tag=content;col1). Communication Research Trends.
11. Berry, David (15 July 2005). "On the "Creative Commons": a critique of the commons without commonalty"
(http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality/). Free Software Magazine. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
12. Lessig, Lawrence (2004). Free Culture (http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf) (PDF). New York: Penguin Press. p.8. ISBN1-59420-006-8.
13. Ermert, Monika (2004-06-15). "Germany debuts Creative Commons" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/). The
Register.
14. Lessig, Lawrence (2006). "Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons and the Remix Culture"
(https://web.archive.org/web/20080205034639/http://talk.talis.com/archives/2006/01/lawrence_lessig.html) (mp3). Talking with Talis. Archived from
the original (http://talk.talis.com/archives/2006/01/lawrence_lessig.html) on 2008-02-05. Retrieved 2006-04-07.
15. "Board of Directors - Creative Commons" (http://creativecommons.org/board). Creative Commons. Retrieved 2015-03-10.
16. "CC Affiliate Network" (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_Affiliate_Network). Creative Commons. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
17. "Creative Commons Korea" (http://www.cckorea.org/xe/?mid=main). CCkorea.org. Retrieved 20 December 2011.
18. "CC Asia Conference 2010" (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_Asia_Conference_2010). Creative Commons. 21 July 2010. Retrieved 20 December
2011.
19. "Syria" (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Syria).
20. Paley, Nina (2010-03-04). "The Limits of Attribution" (http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/03/04/the-limits-of-attribution/). Nina Paley's Blog. Retrieved
2013-01-30.
21. John Dvorak (July 2005). "Creative Commons Humbug" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1838244,00.asp). PC Magazine
22. Schaeffer, Maritza (2009). "Note and Comment: Contemporary Issues in the Visual Art World: How Useful are Creative Commons Licenses?"

(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7081/is_3_26/ai_n28457434?tag=content;col1). Journal of Law and Policy.

23. Elkin-Koren, Niva (2006). "Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=885466). The Future of the Public Domain (P. Bernt Hugenholtz and Lucie Guibault, eds.).
24. Lessig, Lawrence (2004). "The Creative Commons". 65 Mont. L. Rev. 1.
25. "Debian Social Contract" (http://www.debian.org/social_contract). Debian. 2004-04-26. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
26. Evan Prodromou (3 April 2005). "Summary of Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses" (http://evan.prodromou.name/ccsummary/ccsummary.html). debianlegal (mailing list).
27. Garlick, Mia (2007-02-23). "Version 3.0 Launched" (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7249). Creative Commons. Retrieved 2007-07-05.
28. "The DFSG and Software Licenses - Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-SA) v3.0" (https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#CreativeCommonsShareAlike.28CC-SA.29v3.0). Debian Wiki. Retrieved 2009-03-16.
29. Benjamin Mako Hill (29 July 2005). "Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement"
(http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html).
30. "CC Learn Explanations: Remixing OER: A guide to License Compatibility" (http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/cclearnexplanations-cc-license-compatability.pdf). Creative Commons CC Learn. Retrieved 29 November 2010
31. "Can I combine two different Creative Commons licensed works? Can I combine a Creative Commons licensed work with another non-CC licensed
work?"
(http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_combine_two_different_Creative_Commons_licensed_works.3F_Can_I_combine_a_Creative_Common
s_licensed_work_with_another_non-CC_licensed_work.3F). FAQ. Creative Commons. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
32. "Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported" (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Creative Commons. Retrieved
18 November 2009.
33. "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported" (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). Creative Commons. Retrieved
18 November 2009.
34. Stallman, Richard M. "Fireworks in Montreal" (http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html). FSF Blogs. Retrieved 18 November 2009.
35. Orlowski, Andrew (July 2009). "The Tragedy of the Creative Commons" (http://andreworlowski.com/2009/07/16/the-tragedy-of-the-creativecommons/).
36. Erik Moeller (2006). "The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License" (http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTechSoftware/wtr_16073,300,p1.html). Open Source Jahrbuch.
37. Lessig, Lawrence (2005). "CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Important Freedoms" (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5719). Creative
Commons.
38. "On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code" (https://sites.google.com/site/hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz/commons) (video). 23C3
Who can you trust?. 2006. google video docid=7661663613180520595. Retrieved 2014-02-07.
39. Gordon Haff (2007-11-26). "Does the Noncommercial Creative Commons license make sense?" (http://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-

39. Gordon Haff (2007-11-26). "Does the Noncommercial Creative Commons license make sense?" (http://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercialcreative-commons-license-make-sense/). CNET. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
40. Evan Prodromou (2005-04-19). "Use cases for NonCommercial license clause" (http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2005-April/002215.html).
cc-licenses mailing list. Retrieved 2015-02-22.

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confId=a035925)" In CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the Benefits of OAI (OAI3),
1214 February 2004 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva: CERN, 2004. (video)
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(https://web.archive.org/web/20110614224322/http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7475)" Syllabus Magazine (April 2003).
. "Out of the Way: How the Next Copyright Revolution Can Help the Next Scientific Revolution.
(http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0000009)" PLoS Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 3031.
Chillingworth, Mark. "Creative Commons Attracts BBC's Attention.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20100228042054/http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155821/)" Information World Review, 11 June 2004.
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"Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses" (http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-0428-a.html). Cover Pages. 28 April 2004.
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Mller Erik, The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License
(https://web.archive.org/web/20080410233936/http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/download/jb2006/chapter_06/osjb2006-06-02-enmoeller.pdf), in Open Source Jahrbuch 2006 (http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/).
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External links
Official website (https://creativecommons.org/)
Creative Commons wiki (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/)
Creative Commons Videos with subtitles (https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Videos)
Short Flash animation describing Creative Commons (http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Creative_Commons&oldid=655815411"
Categories: Creative Commons Computer law organizations Copyleft Copyright law organizations Free music
Intellectual property organizations Organizations established in 2001 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations

This page was last modified on 10 April 2015, at 10:53.

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