Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians/Chapter 1
1
What Is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a set of legal tools, a nonprofit organization, a global network and a movement—all inspired by people’s willingness to share their creativity and knowledge, and enabled by a set of open copyright licenses.
Creative Commons began in response to an outdated global copyright legal system. CC licenses are built on copyright and are designed to give more options to creators who want to share. Over time, the role and value of Creative Commons have expanded. This chapter will introduce you to where Creative Commons came from and where it is headed.
This chapter has three sections:
- The Story of Creative Commons
- Creative Commons Today
- Additional Resources
! Completing the Creative Commons Certificate does not entitle learners to provide legal advice on copyright, fair use/fair dealing, or open licensing. The content in this book and the information that Certificate facilitators share in the Creative Commons course is also not legal advice. While you should not share legal advice with others based on this book’s content, you will develop a high level of expertise upon completion of this book. You will learn a lot about copyright, open licensing, and open practices in various communities. Upon finishing this book, you should feel comfortable sharing the facts about copyright and open licensing, case studies, and good open practices.
1.1 | THE STORY OF CREATIVE COMMONS
To understand how a set of copyright licenses could inspire a global movement, you need to know a bit about the origin of Creative Commons (CC).
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Retell the story of why Creative Commons was founded
- Identify the role of copyright law in the creation of Creative Commons
THE BIG QUESTION: WHY IT MATTERS
What were the legal and cultural reasons for the founding of Creative Commons? Why has CC grown into a global movement?
Creative Commons’ founders recognized the mismatch between what technology enables and what copyright restricts, and in response they have provided an alternative approach for creators who want to share their work with others. Today this approach is used by millions of creators around the globe.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
When did you first learn about Creative Commons? Think about how you would articulate what CC is to someone who has never heard of it. To fully understand the organization, it helps to start with a bit of history.
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
The story of Creative Commons begins with copyright. You’ll learn a lot more about copyright later in this book, but for now it’s enough to know that copyright is an area of law that regulates the way the products of human creativity are used—products like books, academic research articles, music, and art. Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights to a creator, so that the creator has the ability to prevent others from copying and adapting their work for a limited time. In other words, copyright law strictly regulates who is allowed to copy and share with whom.
The Internet has given us the opportunity to access, share, and collaborate on human creations (all governed by copyright) at an unprecedented scale. But the sharing capabilities made possible by digital technology are in tension with the sharing restrictions embedded within copyright laws around the world.
Creative Commons was created to help address the tension between creators’ ability to share digital works globally and copyright regulation. The story begins with a particular piece of copyright legislation in the United States. It was called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), and it was enacted in 1998. This Act extended the term of copyright protection for every work in the United States—even those already published—for an additional 20 years, so that the copyright term equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years. (This move put the U.S. copyright term in line with some other countries, though the term in many more countries remains at 50 years after the creator’s death to this day.)
(Fun fact: The CTEA was commonly referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the extension came just before the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, would have fallen into the public domain.)
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig (figure 1.1) believed that this new law was unconstitutional. The term of copyright had been continually extended over the years. The end of a copyright term is important—it marks the moment when a work moves into the public domain, whereupon everyone can use that work for any purpose without permission. This is a critical part of the equation in the copyright system. All creativity and knowledge build on what came before, and the end of a copyright term ensures that copyrighted works eventually move into the public domain and thus join the pool of knowledge and creativity from which we can all freely draw to create new works.
The 1998 law was also hard to align with the purpose of copyright as it is written into the U.S. Constitution—to create an incentive for authors to share their works by granting them a
limited monopoly over them. How could the law possibly further incentivize sharing works that already existed?
Lessig represented a web publisher, Eric Eldred, who had made a career of making works available as they passed into the public domain. Together, they challenged the
FIGURE 1.1 Larry Lessig giving
#CCSummit2011 keynote
Photo from Flickr:
flickr.com/photos/dtkindler/6155457139/
Author: DTKindler | CC BY 2.0
Desaturated from original
Enter Creative Commons
Inspired by the value of Eldred’s goal of making more creative works freely available on the Internet, and in response to a growing community of bloggers who were creating, remixing, and sharing content, Lessig and others came up with an idea. They created a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons and, in 2002, they published the Creative Commons licenses—a set of free, public licenses that would allow creators to keep their copyrights while sharing their works on more flexible terms than the default “all rights reserved” approach. Copyright is automatic, whether you want it or not; the moment an original work is fixed in tangible form, it is protected by copyright. And while some people want to reserve all of the rights to their works, many others want to share their works with the public more freely. The idea behind CC licensing was to create an easy way for creators who wanted to share their works in ways that were consistent with copyright law.
From the start, Creative Commons licenses were intended to be used by creators all over the world. The CC founders were initially motivated by a piece of U. S. copyright legislation, but similar copyright laws all over the world restricted how our shared culture and collective knowledge could be used, even while digital technologies and the Internet have opened new ways for people to participate in culture and knowledge production. Since Creative Commons was founded, much has changed in the way people share and how the Internet operates. In many places around the world, the restrictions on using creative works have increased. Yet sharing and remix are now the norm online. Think about your favorite video mashup, or even the photos your friend posted on social media last week. Sometimes these types of sharing and remix happen in violation of copyright law, and sometimes they happen within social media networks that don’t allow those works to be shared on other parts of the web.
Watch the short video A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan to get a sense for the vision behind Creative Commons. https://creativecommons.org/about/videos/a-shared-culture | CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
FIGURE 1.2 Growth in the number of Creative Commons-licensed works worldwide
In domains like textbook publishing, academic research, documentary film-making, and many other fields, restrictive copyright rules continue to inhibit the creation, access, and remix of works. CC tools are helping to solve this problem. In 2017, CC licenses were used by more than 1.4 billion works online across 9 million websites (figure 1.2); since 2017, the number of CC-licensed works has increased to over 1.6 billion. The grand experiment that started more than fifteen years ago has been a success, sometimes in ways that were unimagined by CC’s founders. (For more information, see the “State of the Commons” at the Creative Commons website: https://stateof.creativecommons.org.) While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up-to-date, free to use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions, and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses.
In the next section, you’ll learn more about what Creative Commons looks like today—the licenses, the organization, and the movement.
Final Remarks
Technology now makes it possible for online content to be consumed by millions of people at once, and it can be copied, shared, and remixed with speed and ease. But copyright law places limits on our ability to take advantage of these possibilities. Creative Commons was founded to help us realize the full potential of the Internet.
1.2| CREATIVE COMMONS TODAY
As a set of legal tools, a nonprofit organization, and a global network and movement, Creative Commons has evolved in many ways over the course of its history.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Differentiate between Creative Commons as a set of licenses, a movement, and a nonprofit organization
- Explain the role of the CC Global Network
- Describe the basic areas of work for Creative Commons as a nonprofit organization
THE BIG QUESTION: WHY IT MATTERS
Now we know why Creative Commons was started. But what is Creative Commons today?
Today CC licenses are prevalent across the web and are used by creators around the world for every type of content you can imagine. The open movement, which extends beyond just CC licenses, is a global force of people committed to the idea that the world is better when we share and work together. Creative Commons is the nonprofit organization that stewards the CC licenses and helps support the open movement.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
When you think about Creative Commons, do you think about its licenses? Or about activists seeking copyright reform? A useful tool for sharing? Symbols in circles? Something else?
In addition to giving creators more choices for how to share their work, CC legal tools serve important policy goals in fields like scholarly publishing and education. Watch the brief video Why Open Education Matters to get a sense of the opportunities that CC licenses create for education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJWbVt2Nc-I | CC BY 3.0
Are you involved with Creative Commons as a creator, a reuser, or an advocate? Would you like to be one of these?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Today, the CC licenses and public domain tools are used on more than 1.6 billion works, from songs to YouTube videos to scientific research. The licenses have helped a global movement come together around openness, collaboration, and shared human creativity. Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization, was once housed within the basement of the Stanford Law School, but now has a staff working around the world on a host of different projects in various domains.
We’ll take these different aspects of Creative Commons—the legal tools, the movement, and the organization—and look at each in turn.
CC LICENSES
CC licenses are legal tools that function as an alternative for creators who choose to share their works with the public under more permissive terms than the default “all rights reserved” approach under copyright. These legal tools are integrated into user-generated content platforms like YouTube, Flickr, and Jamendo, and they are used by nonprofit open projects like Wikipedia and OpenStax. They are also used by formal institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Europeana, and by millions of individual creators.
Collectively, the CC legal tools help create a global commons of diverse types of content that is freely available for anyone to use. CC licenses may additionally serve a non-copyright function. In communities of shared practices, the licenses act to signal a set of values and a different way of operating.
For some users, this means looking back to the economic model of the commons. As the economist David Bollier describes it, “a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.”[1] Wikipedia is a good example of a commons-based community around CC-licensed content.
For a creative take on Creative Commons and copyright, listen to this song by Jonathan “Song-A-Day” Mann about his choice to use CC licenses for his music in Won’t Lock It Down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGP-oW4_ZE | CC BY 3.0
For others, the CC legal tools and their icons express an affinity for a set of core values. CC icons have become ubiquitous symbols for sharing, openness, and human collaboration. The CC logo and icons are now part of the permanent design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
While there is no single motivation for using CC licenses, there is a basic sense that CC licensing is rooted in a fundamental belief that knowledge and creativity are the building blocks of our culture rather than simple commodities from which to extract market value. The licenses reflect a belief that everyone has something to contribute, and that no one can own our shared culture. Fundamentally, the licenses reflect a belief in the promise and benefits of sharing.
THE MOVEMENT
Since 2001, a global coalition of people has formed around Creative Commons and open licensing.[2] This includes activists working on copyright reform around the globe; policy-makers advancing policies that mandate open access to publicly funded educational resources, research, and data; and creators who share a core set of values. In fact, most of the people and institutions that are part of the CC movement are not formally connected to Creative Commons.
Creative Commons has a formal CC Global Network,[3] which includes lawyers, activists, scholars, artists, and more, all working on a wide range of projects and issues connected to sharing and collaboration. But the CC Global Network is just one player in the larger open movement, which includes Wikipedians, Mozillians, open access advocates, and many more.
Open source software is cited as the first domain where networked open sharing produced a tangible benefit as a movement that went much further than technology. The Conversation website’s Explainer summarizes other movements (http://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-the-open-movement-10308) adds other examples, such as Open Innovation in the corporate world, Open Data (see the Open Data Commons at https://opendatacommons.org), and Crowdsourcing. There is also the Open Access movement, which aims to make research widely available; the Open Science movement; and the growing movement around Open Educational Resources.
CREATIVE COMMONS: THE ORGANIZATION
Creative Commons is a small nonprofit organization that stewards the CC legal tools and helps power the open movement. Creative Commons is a distributed organization, with CC staff and contractors working around the world.
In 2016, Creative Commons embarked on a new organizational strategy based on building and sustaining a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude.[4] This is a shift from focusing only on the number of works out there under CC licenses and available for reuse, to a new emphasis on the connections and collaborations which happen around that content.
Guided by that strategy, Creative Commons’ organizational work loosely falls into two main buckets:
- Licenses, tools, and technology: The CC licenses and public domain tools are the core legal tools designed and stewarded by Creative Commons. While our licenses have been rigorously vetted by legal experts around the globe, our work is still not done. We are actively working on technical infrastructure designed to make it easier to find and use all the content in the digital commons. We are also thinking about ways to better adapt all of Creative Commons’ legal and technical tools for today’s web.
- Supporting the movement: Creative Commons works to help people within open movements collaborate on projects and work toward similar goals. Through CC’s multiple programs, we work directly with our global community—across education, culture, science, copyright reform, government policy, and other sectors—to help train and empower open advocates around the world.
Final Remarks
Creative Commons has grown from its home in a law school basement into a global organization with a wide reach and a well-known name associated with a core set of shared values. It is, at one and the same time, a set of licenses, a movement, and a nonprofit organization. We hope this chapter has helped give you a sense of what the organization does and, even more importantly, how you can join us in our work.
1.3 | ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CC HISTORY
- “How I Lost the Big One,” by Lawrence Lessig.
- Lawrence Lessig describes the details of the Eldred case: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp.
- Excerpt from Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. CC BY-NC 1.0.
- This is an excerpt that provides more background on the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case: http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-18.html.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CC AND OPEN LICENSING
- Why Open Education Matters, by David Blake @ Degreed. CC BY 3.0.
- This is a brief video that explains how open education is enabled by the Internet, why it is valuable for the global community, and how Creative Commons licenses enable open education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJWbVt2Nc-I.
- “We Copy like We Breathe,” by Cory Doctorow.
- This is a keynote address that explains copying and how the Internet has changed the space of copying. It frames the need for adequate licensing as we copy and share online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfU6e6--izo.
- “We Need to Talk about Sharing,” by Ryan Merkley @ Creative Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- This is a brief discussion about the value of sharing, how sharing can improve communities, and how Creative Commons enables sharing: https://vimeo.com/151666798.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE COMMONS
- How Does the Commons Work, by the Next System Project, adapted from Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm. CC BY 3.0.
- This video, adapted from the economist David Bollier’s explanation of what a commons is, explains how a commons works and describes threats to the commons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQiBcd7mBc.
- “The Commons Short and Sweet,” by David Bollier. CC BY 3.0.
- This is a brief blog post explanation of a commons, some problems of a commons, and what enables a commons to occur: http://bollier.org/commons-short-and-sweet.
- The Wealth of the Commons: A World beyond Market and State, by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- This book seeks many voices to gather descriptions of what types of resources exist in the commons, the geographic circumstances relating to the commons, and the political relevance of the commons: http://wealthofthecommons.org.
- “Enclosure,” Wikipedia article. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- This is an article describing enclosure, which is an issue that presents itself in a commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure.
- “The Political Economy of the Commons,” by Yochai Benkler. CC BY 3.0.
- This is a brief article that explains how a common infrastructure can sustain the commons: https://web.archive.org/web/20130617041302/http://www.boell.org/downloads/Benkler_The_Political_Economy_of_the_commons.pdf.
- “The Tragedy of the Commons,” by Boundless and Lumen Learning.
- This is a section of an economics course textbook that explains the economic principles underlying potential threats to the commons: https://www.boundless.com/economics/textbooks/boundless-economics-textbook/market-failure-public-goods-and-common-resources-8/common-resources-62/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-235-12326.
- “Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons,” by On the Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- This is a short article describing how the “tragedy” of the commons can be overcome: http://www.onthecommons.org/debunking-tragedy-commons.
- “Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons,” by On the Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- This is a short history of the economist Elinor Ostrom and the eight principles that she has established for managing a commons: http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OTHER OPEN MOVEMENTS
- Free Culture Game, by Molle Industria. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
- This is a game to help understand the concept of free culture: http://www.molleindustria.org/en/freeculturegame.
CC Certificate participants have recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight the participants’ contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources.
NOTES
- ↑ David Bollier, “The Commons, Short and Sweet,” David Bollier (blog), July 15, 2011, http://www.bollier.org/commons-short-and-sweet. CC BY 3.0.
- ↑ While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up-to-date, free to use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions, and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses.
- ↑ The work of the CC Global Network is organized into what we call “Network Platforms;” think of them as working groups. Anyone interested in working on a Platform can join and contribute as much or as little time and effort as they choose. Read more about our Network Platforms at https://creativecommons.org/about/global-affiliate-network/network-platforms/ to see if there is an area of work that interests you. If interested, please get involved!
- ↑ For more information on this policy, see https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/ideas.