About the Creative Commons License
By Paul Biba
If you are not familiar with Creative Commons you should be. Here’s a good article from the Chamber Four blog:
A Creative Commons license allows an author or artist to decide the parameters of how his or her work is shared. Will you allow your song to be remixed, your book to be copied for free in writing classes, will you modify your license to require a percentage of the profits from anything that borrows from your work? It is flexible, and it makes sense, and it leaves the power in the hands of those who created the work, rather than those with the most lawyers on retainer.
Their mission is simple and straightforward:
Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.
We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
[emphasis theirs]
In a mere 8 years they’ve already licensed over 120 million works, under the four main headings of Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial, and No Derivative Works. The license names are rather self explanatory, but you can read more here. This is building the internet into a broadening public domain, where art as business and art as a social right can coexist peacefully and without passwords. It’s not just for small fries either, with heavy hitters like Nine Inch Nails and writers such as Cory Doctorow seeing much success with these licenses. And it’s best for readers and users, who have un- or lightly fettered access to a wide variety of culture and art on the internet (not unlike visiting a library rather than a Borders).
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 am
The Creative Commons is a great initiative to helping clarify the topic of copyrights and I’m going to be fully supporting the initiative with a project which is being released soon – MeeQi.com
Really excited about it and thank you Paul for promoting CC. It’s a worthwhile cause
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Hey Paul,
Thanks for bringing up my post. CC is an excellent endeavor, and deserves all the attention it can get. -Sean
July 3rd, 2009 at 12:36 am
Creative Commons is definitely a nice legal framework for reminding the user (licensee) what their rights are with regards to the content they are using. I encourage people to also check out http://www.youtils.com which extends the Creative Common model by not only supporting the Creative Commons Attribution license but also enables image owners to understand how and where their images are being used online.