Creative Commons

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

Revision as of 16:15, 18 November 2015

Creative Commons official logo from the Creative Commons website

Creative Commons Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization which set out to enable sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. CC licences are intended to work worldwide and within existing boundaries of copyright law; they do not replace copyright. The licences set out the re-use conditions for someone making use of another’s material. The licences themselves are made up of three layers: the common deeds or human readable code which sets out simplified terms of re-use, the machine-readable code which standardizes the format for inclusion of the licence or citation in metadata, and underpinning this is the actual legal code. ^[1]

History

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with support of the Center for the Public Domain. It was founded by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. A board of directors leads Creative Commons; the board of directors is comprised of investors, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and professionals in many fields like education, technology, and law. ^[2]

In December 2002, they released its first set of Copyright Licenses that were free to the public. The licenses were in part inspired by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). In the years following the release, Creative Commons grew exponentially and were ported to over 50 affiliate networks.

In 2003, there were approximately one million dollars in use. By 2004, there were an estimated 4.7 million licensed by the end of the year. In that year, License 2.0 was released. In the following year 2005, Creative commons grew to over 20 million licensed works. Some improvements were made and License 2.5 was released before year-end. ^[3]

In 2005, Creative Commons created the Science Project. The project build commons based infrastructure for science; they identified and lowered “the through identifying and lowering unnecessary barriers to research, crafting policy guidelines and legal agreements, and developing technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.”

In 2007, the licenses in use reached approximately 90 million. On the fifth birthday of the licenses, License 3.0 was released. The education project was released. Like the science project, it created an infrastructure to make education tools and projects easier to use and share. In the following year, the licenses almost doubled, and Lawrence Lessig stepped down from his position of CEO.

In 2009, licenses in use reached 350 million. Wikipedia migrated to Creative Commons: Attribution – ShareAlike as its content licensing. They released CC0.^[4]

As of Novemeber, 2014, 882 Million licenses in use. As of 2015, there are more than 100 affiliates working in 75 jurisdictions around the world. ^[5]

Creative Commons Licensing and Copyright

While Creative Commons is considered to lead the copy leftist movement, they do not see themselves as being against [Copyright] entirely. Creative Commons promotes Copyright reform. Their website states that “while free licensing is important, it is not enough to reform copyright alone.” Creative Commons serves as an alternative or an accompaniment to copyright. ^[6]

The CC method of protecting authorship rights falls between open source and full copyright protection. Using the Creative Commons license, an author can choose to seek attribution, limit modifications, prohibit commercial uses, or demand that others similarly share any work derived from the protected material. ^[7]

"The point of Creative Commons is to provide a middle ground between two extreme views of copyright protection—one 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 creator.” - Lawrence Lessig ^[8]

In 2009, Creative Commons released a new infrastructure for licensing called CCO. It allows artists, designers, educators, scientists, creators and “owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works” and thereby place them in the [domain], so others may “freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.” CC0 is licensing infrastructure that works to serve the public domain. It is for creators that want to share their work in as whole a form as possible to be part of the creative process. Creative Commons users chose from a range or permissions available while retaining copyright. “While CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether, – the choice to opt out of copyright and database protection, and the exclusive rights automatically granted to creators” – the “no rights reserved” alternative to Creative Commons licenses. This caters to the copy leftists. ^[9]

Creative Commons in Education

The role of CC in classrooms has shown to play a positive influence for knowledge sharing. Previous research findings reveal that adopting the CC mechanism is helpful in shaping student perception of and interaction with the environment they are engaged in. For example, by using CC for collaborative projects reveals that students manifest a higher level of mutual support under a CC-integrated collaborative environment. The CC mechanism has mainly been employed to support informal online learning contexts such as the online discussion forum. Furthermore, students are engaged in the same learning task and sharing of course work may influence their learning performance assessment. ^[10] For schools, these options provide useful ways to share their own work but also convenient ways to avoid copyright violations in work produced by their teachers and students. It is important to remember, though, that these alternatives are only opt-in presently. It is up to the user to understand the specific license on any work before making copies. While these alternatives are useful, their application is still very limited. Standard copyright protection still applies to the vast majority of books, videos, images, and software—virtually all the content that schools use to aid in teaching, except for the doctrine of [fair use] which allows some felxibility. ^[11]

External Links

Creative Commons Website

References

1. ↑ Gulley, N. (2013). Creative Commons: challenges and solutions for researchers; a publisher's perspective of copyright in an open access environment. Insights: The UKSG Journal, 26(2), 168-173. doi:10.1629/2048-7754.107
2. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/about/history
3. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
4. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
5. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/about/history
6. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/about/reform
7. ↑ Bathon, J. (2013). Staying on the Right Side of Copyright in Education. T H E Journal, 40(12), 21-24.
8. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5719
9. ↑ http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
10. ↑ Chen-Chung, L., Chia-Ching, L., Chun-Yi, C., & Po-Yao, C. (2014). Knowledge Sharing among University Students Facilitated with a Creative Commons Licensing Mechanism: A Case Study in a Programming Course. Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 17(3), 154-167.
11. ↑ Bathon, J. (2013). Staying on the Right Side of Copyright in Education. T H E Journal, 40(12), 21-24.