Creative Commons



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.

Aim
The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some 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 holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide 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 the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture pervading modern society; a culture pressed hard upon society by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema.

History
The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License (OPL) 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 OPL is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects not use it. Both the OPL and the GFDL 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 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".

Localization
The non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording may not mesh perfectly with existing law in other countries. Although somewhat unlikely, using the U.S. model without regard to local law could render the licenses unenforceable. To address this issue, the iCommons (International Commons) project intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. As of November 30, 2005, representatives from 46 countries and regions have joined this initiative, and licenses for 26 of those countries have already been completed.

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.

Some of the best-known CC-licensed projects and works include:


 * Media archives (for a subset of works where the uploader chooses a Creative Commons license): Flickr, Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, and Ourmedia
 * Groklaw
 * MIT OpenCourseWare - academic course syllabi
 * Jamendo - Music archive
 * Public Library of Science
 * Star Wreck movies, the most recent being Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
 * The podcast This Week in Tech
 * Wikinews, Wikitravel, Memory Alpha, Uncyclopedia, and many other wikis
 * ccMixter, a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons

Notable works

 * Professor Lessig's 2004 electronic version of the book Free Culture. (The printed version of the book, however, was published under a full copyright.)
 * 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: 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 (all three with added proviso)
 * Teach, a 2001 short film directed by Davis Guggenheim.
 * Cactuses, a 2006 full-length dramatic movie.

Record labels

 * LOCA Records
 * Magnatune
 * Fading Ways Music
 * Disfish
 * Opsound
 * Kahvi Collective
 * Small Brain Records
 * Krayola Records

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

 * iRATE radio
 * Gnomoradio
 * Yahoo! Creative Commons Search
 * Google Advanced Search
 * CC:Mixter - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
 * Common Content
 * Jamendo - an archive of music albums under Creative Commons licenses
 * The Assayer - a catalog of free/copylefted books
 * Flickr Creative Commons search - photos on Flickr
 * Creative Commons Find Page
 * Open Clip Art Library

Criticisms of Creative Commons
During its first year as an organization, Creative Commons experienced a "honeymoon" period with worldwide success and 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 the following types:


 * 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 follow the model of the Free (libre) or Open Source movements by defining a set of core freedoms or terms which all CC licensed works must satisify. These terms might, or might not, be the same core freedoms as the heart of the free software movement. (e.g. See Hill 2005 and the writings of Richard Stallman).
 * A political position - Where the object is to critically analyse the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an immanent 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).

Creative Commons in Court
In early 2006, Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos, without permission, from his Flickr page, which was protected under a Creative Commons license. While the verdict was in favour of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to Mr. Curry so long as they did not repeat the offence. Pamela Jones 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."