Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 to promote an expansion of copyright law to allow greater access, use, and repurposing of creative works. Free culture advocate Lawrence Lessig is among the organization's founders. Since 2005, the organization has expanded to scientific works with its project Science Commons. The group offers licenses that can be applied by copyright owners to their work to allow or prohibit certain uses. Originally focused on U.S. copyright law, the group has expanded its licenses to be compatible with copyright laws in more than 50 countries.

As opposed to blanket retention of rights by intellectual property holders, the licenses allow some rights to be granted to the public. The organization draws on an idea of a “public commons” of creative content that allows the public to interact with creative works with a greater degree of freedom than increasingly restrictive copyright laws allow, believing that more sharing leads to a more robust society. Somewhere between the “all rights reserved” of copyright, and the public domain, with “no rights reserved,” Creative Commons argues for “some rights reserved” by the copyright holders, with the rest given over to the public.

Creative Commons draws inspiration from the GNU General Public License, which allows software writers to release their proprietary code for others to use, modify, and redistribute without restrictions. The Creative Commons licenses expand this open source ethos to all creative works.

The organization offers six licenses for use, depending on the copyright holders' preferences. All licenses require attribution when using the work but do not limit users' ability to copy and distribute it. Copyright holders can choose to prohibit commercial use of the work and stipulate that the work not be modified or truncated in any way. Licenses can also request the users “share alike,” or make any modified versions of the work available for further modification under a compatible and similar licensing scheme. A creative work can be released under a basic “Attribution” license, with no restrictions on use beyond a credit to the creator. At the same time, a work can be licensed under the most restrictive license “Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works,” which prohibits commercial use of the work and any modification or truncating.

Creative Commons licensing is facilitated primarily by the Internet and is particularly well suited to digital content, though it can be applied to any creative work. Photograph-sharing website

[Page 148]http://Flickr.com allows its users to apply Creative Commons licensing to their pictures through built-in mechanisms. The Creative Commons site offers code that web authors can include in their sites—often using the phrase “some rights reserved”—to denote licensing schemes and to link back to the Creative Commons sites so potential users can get more information. As a result of the technical nature of applying the licenses, their effective use is most common in global North countries and relies on the existence of a cultural dialogue about intellectual property.