The Creative Commons launches [LWN.net]

Lawrence Lessig (and others) first start talking about the Creative Commons Project some months ago. It took until December 16, however, for the formal launch

of the project. Now that Create Commons is live, it's time for a good look at what they are up to.

The Creative Commons is a reaction to the steady increase in the power of copyright holders over their creations. By allowing creators to lock up their work indefinitely, the expansion of copyright protection is impoverishing the intellectual "commons" -- the pool of ideas and works in the public domain from which all can draw. By denying the growth of the commons, content producers are denying the basic fact that the work they would lock up also has its roots in that commons. Disney may have done children a great service by cleaning up the gory and depressing parts of "The Little Mermaid," but the foundation of the company's work lies deep within the commons where the original Mermaid lives.

The copyright battle is being fought on many fronts, including in legislatures and courts. The Creative Commons is taking a different approach, however: it is attempting to create an explicit commons to which creators of copyrightable works can donate their output. This effort has, for now, two components.

The first is the Licensing Project. This project aims to move works into the commons immediately by providing a whole set of licenses for releasing works with varying degrees of freedom. Content producers can select a license by answering three basic questions:

Should people redistributing the work be required to credit the original author?
Can others make commercial use of the work?
Can others distribute (and perform, display, etc.) derived products of work, or may it be used only in unaltered form? In the case where changes are allowed, must the changes be distributed under the same license?

The answers to those questions map onto a list of eleven licenses that reflect the author's wishes. (The twelfth case - the one with no restrictions - is apparently deemed as being equivalent to releasing the content into the public domain). The more restrictive licenses would not be considered truly "free," since they restrict commercial use and the ability to make changes. On the other hand, the "Attribution" license is fairly BSD-like, and "ShareAlike" takes its cue from the GPL.

Not everybody wants to make their work freely distributable from the beginning, however. For those who want to enjoy the benefits of copyright protection for a while, but who would still like to see their work pass into the commons in a timely manner, there is the Founders' Copyright project. Essentially, the Founders' Copyright attempts to take copyright law back to 1790 by way of a contract which will release a given work into the public domain after 14 years. O'Reilly & Associates, which has funded the Creative Commons, has pledge to put some (currently unspecified) works into the public domain under these terms.

The path ahead of the Creative Commons project looks difficult; how many content producers will really be interested in giving away their current legal rights in order to nourish an amorphous "commons"? Twenty years ago, however, one could have reasonably asked why any sane programmer would donate code to a seemingly infeasible project to create a free operating system? As people become more aware of the costs of freezing the growth of the true intellectual commons, there may well be room for the development of a privatized version. We need that commons, one way or another.

As an aside, those who are interested in U.S. copyright law and its expansion over the years may want to have a look at The Progress of Science and the Useful Arts, a lengthy report from the Free Expression Policy Project.

Another leading thinker, Siva Vaidhyanathan, puts 'intellectual property talk' at the root of today's conflicts over anti-circumvention technology, extensions of the 'limited time' of copyright, and other efforts by the industry to expand its profits and control. Vaidhyanathan writes that copyright 'was not meant to be a property right as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access.' Viewing creative expression as property distorts this original concept.

The report looks at copyright from the beginning through to current issues (copyright extension, DMCA, etc.). It's a long but worthwhile read.

(Log in to post comments)

The Creative Commons launches

Posted Dec 19, 2002 4:24 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think a big reason for the existance of open source software is that it gets created for some
personal reason, and then released because there is no significant cost to releasing it. The
same is likely to apply to other sorts of copyrightable works. In fact, I happen to be writing
a copyrightable work at the moment (well, if I kept at it for a while), and I intend to put it
out for free distribution. I'm doing this primarily for the purpose of focusing my own thoughts
on the subject, but, once I've written it, it doesn't cost me anything to post it. This would
be a good thing for anyone who might write in to question people's willingness to contribute to
the creative commons. Just consider the volume of text contributed to slashdot and livejournal
by people who have probably never considered the fact that they could try to sell that text and
the number of recent memes whose creators never looked for compensation. Currently, such works
are in a gray area with respect to copyright (the "All Your Base" movie is presumably
copyrighted, but who knows what the creator's wishes are with respect to licensing?), but that
would probably be different if you could just stick on the name of the license at no extra
effort and have people generally respect it.

The Creative Commons launches

Posted Dec 30, 2002 0:05 UTC (Mon) by wyrdwright (guest, #4747) [Link]

Everyone has a personal "hot button" issue or another. Some of the more foaming types have several, dotted like landmines across the soul. I hope mine are rather few, but on the December 19 edition of the Linux Weekly News, I'm afraid Jonathan Corbet walked right over one of mine by saying that "Disney may have done children a great service by cleaning up the gory and depressing parts of 'The Little Mermaid'". Rather than being off-topic though, I am sending this note because I think the fight for a Commons is so much more important than what you can do with a distribution of Linux. Rather, the code is only a part of a much bigger problem.

If you have read one of the more folkloric versions of "The Little Mermaid", there are two elements which have been overlooked in the Disney version which are absolutely critical to the purpose of the story. One is the bargain. The little mermaid herself (Why Disney might have named her "Arial", I don't know, but it was singular bad taste...) makes the bargain against her family's wishes that she will get legs and be able to persue her beloved, who she does not know, but has seen from the shallows. She gets the legs, but they make her feel as if she is walking on glass and knives whenever she uses them, a sacrifice she makes willingly. Secondly, the little mermaid discovers after having made the bargain that her lover is not faithful, and abandons her after having his way with her. This leaves her stranded and in pain between the world she comes from and the world she chose, but rejects her.

As a fairy tale, it's warning is "Don't decide to sacrifice the familiar for the exciting before you know for sure you can live the life you dream. You may ruin your chances at happiness in both places if you fail," which is good advice for a fairy tale to give. Disney's version is more along the lines of "Whatever trouble you get into, Daddy will make it O.K.," which is the kind of advice we have had far too much of, In My Curmugeonly Opinion.

What worries me is that Disney may gain the power to prevent anyone from telling the tale as it was meant to be told, forever destroying a bit of the wisdom that makes us human, much as a software company, through a patent, destroys a bit of the common good by robbing the commons of it's commodity.

So we're not just fighting for our code by fighting for the Commons. In a way, we are also fighting for our cultural heritage. Maybe even in a small way, for our souls.

Barry King
Kingston, Ontario
Canada