Creative Commons

Founded	2001
Founder	Lawrence Lessig
Type	Non-profit organization
Focus	Expansion of "reasonable", flexible copyright
Location	San Francisco, California  United States
Method	Creative Commons licenses
Website	http://creativecommons.org/

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Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.^[1] The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved."^[2] David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely".^[3]

Creative Commons works to counter what the organization considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past".^[4] Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.^[5][6]

The current CEO of Creative Commons is Joi Ito. Mike Linksvayer is vice president, John Wilbanks is vice president of science, and Ahrash Bissell is the Executive Director of ccLearn.

The current Creative Commons Board includes: Hal Abelson, James Boyle (Chair), Michael W. Carroll, Davis Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Jimmy Wales, and Esther Wojcicki.^[7]

The Technical Advisory Board includes five members: Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Barbara Fox, Don McGovern and Eric Miller. Hal Abelson also serves on the Creative Commons Board.^[7]

Creative Commons also has an Audit Committee, with two members: Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Lawrence Lessig. Both serve on the Creative Commons Board.^[7]

Creative Commons licenses contain four major permissions:

• Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work's original author. All Creative Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not contain this component.
• Authors can either not restrict modification, or use Share-alike (sa), which is a copyleft requirement that requires that any derived works be licensed under the same license, or No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modified.
• Non-commercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.

As of the current versions, all Creative Commons licenses allow the "core right" to redistribute a work for non-commercial purposes without modification. The Non-commercial and No derivatives options will make a work non-free.

Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses.^[8] On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world.^[9] CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines (see CC licensed content directories).

On January 13, 2009, some broadcasting content from Al Jazeera on the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict was released as creative commons.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]}

The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording could be incompatible within different local legislations and render the licenses unenforceable in various jurisdictions. To address this issue, Creative Commons International has started to port the various licenses to accommodate local copyright and private law. As of December 2008, there are 50 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with 8 other jurisdictions in drafting process, and more countries joining the worldwide project.^[16]

Matteo Pasquinelli (2008) describes two fronts of criticism: "those who claim the institution of a real commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non-commercial, share-alike, etc.)^{[clarification needed]} and those who point out Creative Commons complicity with global capitalism".^{[clarification needed]} Pasquinelli specifically criticises Creative Commons for not establishing "productive commons".^{[clarification needed][17]}

Critics have also argued that Creative Commons worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible.^[18] Most notably 'attribution-sharealike' and 'attribution-noncommercial-sharealike' are incompatible, meaning that works under these licenses cannot be combined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the license-holder.^[19][20] Pro-copyright commentators from within the content industry argue either that Creative Commons is not useful, or that it undermines copyright.^[21][22]

Some within the copyleft movement argue that only the Attribution-ShareAlike license is actually a true copyleft license ^[23] and that there is no standard of freedom between Creative Commons licenses (as there is, for example, within the free software and open source movements). ^[24] An effort within the movement to define a standard of freedom has resulted in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.^[25] In February 2008, Creative Commons recognized the definition and added an "Approved for Free Cultural Works" badge to its two Creative Commons licenses which comply—Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. ^[26]

The maintainers of Debian GNU/Linux, a Linux distribution known for its adherence to software freedom, do not believe that even the Creative Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which could restrict private redistribution to some extent) and its requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.^[27] As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers them non-free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licenses, so they can be compatible with the DFSG.^[28] In contrast to the CC-SA 2.0 license, version 3.0 is considered to be compatible to the DFSG.^[29]

The Free Software Foundation accepts the CC-BY v2.0 and the CC-BY-SA v2.0 Creative Commons licenses as being free, though not recommending it for software, but explains that it is vital to avoid the problem with the overly vague statement "I use a Creative Commons license" , without noting the actual license.^[30][31] Richard Stallman has criticised particular licenses for not allowing the freedom to make verbatim copies of the work for noncommercial purposes, and said that he no longer supported Creative Commons as an organisation, as the licenses no longer had this freedom in common.^[32] Creative Commons have since retired these licenses, and no longer recommends their use ^[33], and in recent times the FSF and CC organisations have regained confidence in one another, as is shown by the GFDL v1.3, which allows wikis such as Wikipedia to transfer to the CC-BY-SA v3.0 license ^[34].

***** In the following paragraph Flickr is referred to but the issue refers to all instances of creative commons media sources *****

Flickrvio or Flickrwashing is the term used (within the wikipedia / wikepida commons community)^[35] when an item in Flickr has been classified as a freely licensed piece of work ie on the {{cc-by}} or {{cc-by-sa}} but should not actually be on this license. The problem is that potentially an infant could have uploaded a picture to Flickr and then ticked the box that states the picture should be on a creative commons license. In fact, anyone might decide to place the picture (or other media) within a creative commons category without any understanding or care of copyright laws or the consequences of doing so. This leaves the public in thinking that the media is perfectly safe to use for their purposes and then later down the line could face serious consequences. It is therefore important to note the following before deciding to use a creative commons piece of media:

• Is it plausible that the Flickr uploader did take the image him or herself?
• If it looks like:
  • a poster,
  • promotional photo,
  • wallpaper,
  • screensaver,
  • celebrity shot,
  • advertisement,
  • or some such,

  ...then it is suspect.

• Take a look at other uploads of the same Flickr user.

  If there are other such items in the user's uploads, extra careful evaluation is needed.

Also it is worth considering avoiding pictures where potentially there is a large commercial organisation (for example the Premier League or an individual football club) that would be really upset if you decided to make for example, a new football sticker book with pictures of footballers that you decided to use becuase the images have been labelled with 'creative commons commercial use allowed'. This is because large commericial organisations have the time, money and resources to launch a costly legal challenge which could be very expensive, stressful and have serious repercussions.

The winner of creative commons licences is perhaps the small to medium size business sector when they are not creating mass market media campaigns. This is because if at the end of the day there is a problem with the media used (e.g. due to a person not giving there permission to use their image such as in the Virgin Mobile (Legal Cases) section below) then they may be decide to take their actions further and perhaps go to their local court of law - only to find that the local court doesn't have any jurisdiction (like in the Virgin Mobile case) and that if the person wanted to take the matter further then they would have to mount a full legal challenge at their countries highest court of law or even in international courts. Such a process could potentially cost an individual hundreds of thousands of pounds, and even then may not be successful. Even if successful they still may be stood to gain only an unsubstantial amount in settlement so they would be unlikely to challenged legally. Also people should be aware of using CC media containing branding or logos (as well as people). Finally it is worth noting that these problems do not only apply to creative commons media but also to commercial stock photography organizations because usually anyone (after a registration process) can contribute to their libraries of stock images.

A related problem is that Flickr allows uploaders to change licenses, but there is no publicly visible history of such license changes. An image may be freely licensed at one point, but later be switched to a more restrictive license or to "all rights reserved" – note though that the previous license cannot be retracted, if the work is uploaded to Commons while under a free license.

Flickr images uploaded to the Commons are therefore reviewed automatically by a piece of software here at the Commons running autonomously. If that software finds that the image is still freely licensed at Flickr, it records that fact at our Image description page. Trusted users (admins and community approved users) may also review Flickr licenses manually.

If the Flickr license changes after a successful review, the image may be kept at the Commons because free licenses cannot be retracted.

Furthermore, copyright holder of the registered copyrighted works can game the CC system by withdrawing CC licenses and erase evidence of the issuing such licenses, then sue people who use the copyrighted works.^[36] (if exposed this would be barred under estoppel) One recent development in response to this problem has been the launch of the ImageStamper website.^[37] ImageStamper keeps dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images on behalf of its users.^[38] The site is currently being extended to support other media types.

A Creative Commons license was first tested in court in early 2006, when podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos without permission from his Flickr page. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favour of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. An analysis of the decision states, "The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."^[39]

In 2007, Virgin Mobile launched a bus stop ad campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-by (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15 year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church,^[40] caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license.^[40] In 2008, the case was thrown out of court for lack of jurisdiction meaning Virgin Mobile were not liable for any accountability or subsequent damages.^[41]

The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.^[42]

• Wikipedia (cc-by-sa, since June 2009)
• Citizendium (cc-by-sa)
• knol (mostly, cc-by-sa or cc-by-nc-sa)

• Category:Commons resources
• Copyleft
• Creative Commons licenses
• Creative Commons Rights Expression Language
• Digital freedom
• Free content
• Free software
• Gratis versus libre
• List of works available under a Creative Commons License
• Open content
• Open source
• Public domain
• Science Commons
• Share-alike

• Creative Commons home page
• Creative Commons wiki
• Short Flash animation describing Creative Commons
• Creative Commons Explained: Lawrence Lessig on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos