The genius of the Creative Commons project lay in disaggregating all the policy decisions implicit in the pre-existing family of open-content licenses and permitting licensors to recombine them individually in whatever fashion best suited their intent.[1] Creative Commons licenses present authors, in effect, with a menu of license criteria, each reflecting a particular policy decision, from which the author is free to pick and choose. The various possible license criteria (and the recognized Creative Commons abbreviations) are:
- Attribution (“BY”): should users be required to give credit to the original author and/or publisher when they copy or reuse the licensed work?
- Noncommercial (“NC”): are users free to copy or reuse the licensed work for commercial purposes, or for noncommercial purposes only?
- No Derivatives (“ND”): are users free to create derivative works based on the licensed work, or may they reproduce only verbatim copies of the original?
- Share Alike (“SA”): are users free to adopt more restrictive licensing terms for any derivative works they create, or must they adopt the same license chosen by the original author?[2]
All the publicly available Creative Commons licenses presently include the attribution requirement,[3] leaving authors free to select “yes” or “no” as to each of the remaining three options. Although there are eight possible ways
- ↑ To be sure, its innovations in licensing instruments may not be the most important contribution of the Creative Commons project; much like the broader FOSS movement, Creative Commons is as much a social initiative aimed at shifting public norms surrounding the reuse of expressive content as a purely legal organization. See, e.g., Benkler, supra note 11, at 455–56; Jennifer E. Rothman, The Questionable Use of Custom in Intellectual Property, 93 Va. L. Rev. 1899, 1930 (2007) (“Ultimately, the Creative Commons is more of a social movement than an alternative IP regime.”). For a slightly skeptical view of the Creative Commons project from a strong property-rights perspective, however, see Merges, supra note 41, at 196–200.
- ↑ See Creative Commons, License Your Work, http://creativecommons.org/about/license/ (last visited Apr. 2, 2010) [hereinafter License Your Work].
- ↑ See Johnson, supra note 70, at 412–13 (explaining requisites of required attribution). The Creative Commons organization initially promulgated a set of licenses that omitted the attribution requirement, and indeed, those licenses remain available (albeit difficult to locate) on the organization’s web site. See Creative Commons, Retired Licenses, http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses (last visited Mar. 29, 2010). The organization ceased offering (or updating) the non-attribution varieties upon discovering that virtually all licensors were selecting the Attribution variants. See Fisk, supra note 85, at 91 (noting that it remains possible to disclaim the default attribution requirement); Greg Lastowka, Digital Attribution: Copyright and the Right to Credit, 87 B.U. L. Rev. 41, 79–81 (2007) (describing Creative Commons organization’s decision to withdraw non-attribution license variants); accord Abraham Bell & Gideon Pachomovsky, The Evolution of Private and Open Access Property, 10 Theoretical Inquiries L. 77, 97 (2009) (noting that Creative Commons licenses preserve some incidents of private property ownership insofar as “most content owners insist on receiving attribution from users”); Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder, The Romance of the Public Domain, 92 Cal. L. Rev. 1331, 1361 (2004) (offering empirical support for this proposition); Zachary Katz, Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing, 46 IDEA 391, 411 & app. A (2006) (same).
