Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) ―in Spanish, «[Bienes] Comunes Creativos»― is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting access and exchange of culture. It develops a set of free legal instruments that make it easy to use and share both creativity and knowledge. Its headquarters are located in Mountain View, in the state of California, United States.
The legal instruments developed by the organization consist of a set of “model license agreements” or copyright licenses (Creative Commons licenses or CC licences) that offer a simple and standardized way for anyone who creates a work to grant permission for the public to share and use your creative work under the terms and conditions of your choice. In this sense, Creative Commons licenses allow you to easily change the copyright terms and conditions of the work, from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”.[citation required ]
Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but rely on copyright to allow you to choose the terms and conditions of a work's license in a way that best suits the rights holder. For this reason, these licenses have been interpreted as a way of taking control to share intellectual property.[citation required]
The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig (former Stanford University law professor and cyberlaw specialist), Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred, with support from the Center for the Public Domain. The first article about Creative Commons in a general interest publication was written by Hal Plotkin in February 2002. The first set of copyright licenses was released in December 2002. By 2008, there were some 130 million works. under Creative Commons licences. As of October 2011, Flickr alone hosted more than 200 million Creative Commons-licensed photos. By the end of 2015, there were more than 1.1 billion Creative Commons-licensed works worldwide.
Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors and an advisory council. It also has a global network of more than 100 affiliated organizations working in more than 85 countries.
Goals and influences
Creative Commons stands out for being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which aims to support building a richer public domain by providing an alternative to “all rights reserved” of copyright, the so-called “some rights reserved”. David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to rethinking the role of the "commons" in the "information age." Beyond that, Creative Commons has given institutional, practical, and legal support to individuals and groups seeking to experience and communicate with culture with greater freedom.
Creative Commons aims to challenge what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, sees as a dominant and increasingly restrictive culture. Lessig describes this as “a culture whose authors manage to create only with the permission of the powerful or previous authors”. Lessig argues that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products, such as music, photography, and film, but that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.
Global Creative Commons Network
As of April 2018, Creative Commons had more than 100 affiliate organizations working in more than 85 countries to support and promote Creative Commons activities around the world. In 2018, this network was restructured and, after having been based on affiliated organizations, individuals and organizations grouped into chapters began to form part of it.
Creative Commons Sponsors
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has the support of institutional and personal donors for its operation.
Institutional support
Donors over $100,000
- Arcadia Fund
- Brin Wojcicki Foundation
- Ford Foundation
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
- Nature Publishing Group
- Private Internet Access
- Wikimedia Foundation
The full list of donors can be found on the Creative Commons website.
Licenses
Creative Commons or CC licenses are inspired by the Free Software Foundation's GPL (General Public License), and share much of its philosophy. The main idea behind them is to enable a legal model aided by computer tools, in order to facilitate the distribution and use of content.
There is a series of Creative Commons licences, each with different configurations, which allow authors to decide the way in which their work will circulate on the Internet, providing freedom to quote, reproduce, create derivative works and offer it publicly, subject to certain restrictions.
Although originally drafted in English, the licenses have been adapted to various laws in other countries around the world. Among other languages, they have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Basque and Catalan through the Creative Commons International project. There are several Spanish-speaking countries that are involved in this process: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico that already have the licenses translated and operational, while Venezuela is in process of translation and implementation of the same. Likewise, Brazil also has the licenses translated and adapted to its legislation.
Creative Commons licenses are made up of four modules of conditions:
- Attribution / Attribution (BY), it requires reference to the original author.
- Share Alike / Share (SA) allows deriving works under the same license or similar (after or other version for being in different jurisdiction).
- Non-Commercial / Non-commercial (NC), it forces that the work is not used for commercial purposes.
- No Derivative Works / No derivatives (ND), it does not allow to modify the work in any way.
These modules are combined to give rise to the six Creative Commons licences:
- Attribution / Attribution (CC BY).
- Attribution Share Alike / Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA).
- Attribution NoDerivatives / Attribution-No derivatives (CC BY-ND).
- Attribution Non-Commercial / Attribution-Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC).
- Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike / Attribution-NonCommercial-Share (CC BY-NC-SA).
- Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives / Attribution-NonCommercial-No derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).
All Creative Commons licenses allow the “fundamental right” to redistribute the work for non-commercial purposes and without modification. The NC and ND options make the work not free according to the definition of free cultural works.
A special contractual license is the CC0 option, or “No Rights Reserved”. This license releases the work into the public domain (or an equivalent status in jurisdictions where the public domain is not possible). Compared to a public domain statement released to the work, the CC0 statement is less ambiguous and achieves the desired effect on a global scale, rather than being limited to a few jurisdictions.
In the world of software, Creative Commons supports three licenses created by other institutions: the BSD license, the CC GNU LGPL license, and the CC GNU GPL.
Use and list of projects that have released content under Creative Commons licenses
Creative Commons maintains a directory of wiki content of the organizations and projects that use its licenses. On their website they also provide case studies of the projects under said licenses around the world. The contents under these licenses can also be consulted through content directories and search engines.
On January 13, 2009, some Al Jazeera broadcast content on the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict was released under an Attribution 3.0 license.
Some other organizations that have also released content under CC licenses are:
- Arduino (CC BY-SA).
- Citizendium (CC-BY-SA).
- Knol (most CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC-SA).
- Ninjam (CC BY-SA).
- The Saylor Foundation (CC BY).
- Wikipedia (CC BY-SA since June 2009).
- Wikimedia Commons (CC license among other options).
- Wikia (CC BY-SA, since June 2009).
- Mozilla Foundation website (CC BY-SA).
Jurisdictions
The original Creative Commons licenses without localization were written with the United States legal system in mind, so their use could be inconsistent with different local laws and make the licenses unenforceable in some jurisdictions. To address this issue, the Creative Commons Affiliate Network ported the licenses to accommodate local copyright laws. As of May 2010, there were 52 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with another 9 in the process of being drafted.
Starting with version 4.0, released in late 2013, the license set is designed to be used in all jurisdictions without needing to be ported.
Criticism
General criticism
Péter Benjamin Tóth claims that the goals of Creative Commons are already served by the copyright system, and that the slogan of “some rights reserved”, instead of the principle “all rights reserved”, creates a false dichotomy. Copyright provides a list of exclusive rights to the author, of which he decides which ones he wants to sell or donate and which ones he wants to keep. Therefore the concept of "some rights reserved" is not an alternative, but is the same idea as the classic copyright. Other critics fear that the Creative Commons could erode the copyright system, or allow people's creativity to become a "commons good" to be exploited by anyone with spare time and a marker. Some critics question how these licenses are useful to authors, suggesting that Creative Commons serves a "remix culture" and does not address artists' real needs for financial compensation and recognition, nor does it care about the lack of rewards for artists. content producers that will discourage artists from publishing their work.
Some critics argue that the Creative Commons licensing system discourages content producers from making concerted efforts to modernize copyright law.
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig counters that copyright law hasn't always offered the strong and seemingly indefinite protection that today's laws provide. By contrast, copyright terms used to be limited to much shorter terms (of years), and many works never gained protection because they did not follow the now-abandoned mandatory format.
It is also questioned whether the Creative Commons is the "common good" it purports to be, given that at least some of the restrictions apply to people's ability to use resources within the realm of the "common good". This is entirely delimited by private rights and has nothing to do with rights shared by all. Creative Commons also does not defend "creativity" or what aspects a work requires to become part of the "common good".
Critics such as Giles Moss argue that the Creative Commons foundation is not the appropriate mechanism for creating “commons” of original content. Rather, a common good must be created, and its presence maintained, through process and political activism, not through lawyers "writing new rules."
It is also criticized that four of the six licenses are neither free nor open due to the restrictions they impose on reuse, according to the definition of free “a work is free if anyone is free to use, reuse and redistribute said work”. work”, this definition is met only by the Attribution and ShareAlike constraints.
Expansion of licenses and incompatibilities
Critics also argue that Creative Commons has made license expansion worse by providing licenses that are incompatible with each other. The Creative Commons website states: "Because each of the six Creative Commons licenses work differently, resources placed under different licenses do not necessarily have to be able to be combined with each other without violating the terms of any of them." Works with incompatible licenses may not be recombined to form a derivative work without obtaining the permission of the copyright owner. One concern is that without a common legal framework, works that are inadvertently mixed licenses cannot be shared.
The issue of compatibility is especially relevant because the most used licenses are the non-free “NonCommercial” (CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND) licenses and cannot be combined with the free “Attribution- ShareAlike” (CC BY-SA, used for example by Wikipedia).
Misuse of licenses
Since Creative Commons is only a service that provides standardized licenses, not part of any agreement, users could license copyrighted works under a Creative Commons license and redistribute these works on the Internet. There is no Creative Commons database of works under their licenses and all responsibility for their system rests entirely with those who use them. However, this situation is not specific to Creative Commons. All copyright owners must defend their rights individually and there is also no central database with all works. The United States Copyright Office maintains a database of all registered works, but lack of registration does not imply absence of copyright.
Although Creative Commons offers several licenses for different uses, some suggest that the licenses still fail to differentiate between media and the concerns that different authors have. For example, a documentalist may have very different concerns than a software designer or a law professor. Additionally, people who want to use a work under one of these licenses will need to determine if that particular use is permitted by the license or if additional permission is needed.
Lessig commented that the intent of Creative Commons is to provide a middle ground between two extremes of copyright protection, one demanding that all rights should be controlled and the other that none of them should be controlled. Creative Commons provides a third option that allows authors to choose which rights they want to control and which they want to cede. The multitude of licenses reflects the variety of rights that can be passed on to succeeding authors.
The Free Software Foundation
Some Creative Commons licenses have been denounced by the founder of the FSF Richard Stallman because, according to what he says, “do not give everyone [...] minimum freedom to share, noncommercially, any published work”, that is, that CC does not give everyone a modicum of freedom to share any (non-commercial) published work. Mako Hill argues that Creative Commons is wrong to set a "base level of freedom" that all these licenses should reflect and with which rights holders and users should abide. “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.'”, that is, by not having a strong ethical position and not drawing a clear dividing line, CC misses the opportunity and replaces what should have been an appeal to the world where 'essential rights cannot be reserved' ' with a relatively empty call to 'some rights reserved'. Some fear that the popularity of CC could detract from the strict goals of other free content organizations.
Other criticisms of the NonCommercial license
Other critics, such as Erik Möller, raise some issues about the use of the Creative Commons NonCommercial license. The works distributed under this license are not supported by many open content websites, including Wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Möller explains 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”, that is, those most vulnerable to the NC license are not large corporations, but rather small publications such as weblogs, ad-supported radio stations, or local newspapers.
Lessig counters that the current copyright regime also hurts compatibility and authors can lessen this incompatibility by choosing a less restrictive license. Also, the NonCommercial license is useful to prevent someone from commercializing an author's work when he plans to do so in the future.
Debian
The developers of Debian, a GNU/Linux distribution known for its rigid adherence to the definition of free software,[citation needed] even reject the Attribution license before version 3 for being incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines due to the anti-digital rights management provision of the license and the requirement of intermediaries to remove credit from the author at their request. In any case, version 3.0 of the license adds these points and is considered compatible with these guidelines.
Key words (terminology)
- Public domain: it is a concept used in two areas of law: administrative law and copyright.
- in:Developing Nationsdevnations) (In English): establishes special conditions for developing nations.
- Sampling or sampling: is the action of recording a sound in any type of support to be able to reuse it later as part of a new sound recording. Using this musical technique, many composers have performed various artistic works.
- CC-GNU GPL: Software license that guarantees end-users the freedom to use, study, share (copy) and modify the software.
- CC-GNU LGPL: software license that aims to guarantee the freedom to share and modify the software covered by it.
- File exchange: is to provide access to digitally stored information, such as software, multimedia works (audio, video), etc.
- ColorIURIS: is an international system of managing and cession of copyright.
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