Creative Commons Licences (www
The most developed alternative licensing approach is that developed by Larry Lessig of Stanford University in 2001, called Creative Commons (CC). The CC approach provides user-friendly open licences for digital materials and so avoids the automatically applied copyright restrictions. The popularity of CC licences has grown incrementally since its launch in 2002 and by 2006 it was estimated that 45 million web pages had been licensed with a CC licence (Smith & Casserly, 2006). Liang (2004, pg. 78) describes the philosophy of Creative Commons as follows:
- Inspired by the free software movement, the Creative Commons believes that a large vibrant public domain of information and content is a pre-requisite to sustained creativity, and there is a need to proactively enrich this public domain by creating a positive rights discourse. It does this by creating a set of licenses to enable open content and collaboration, as well as acting as a database of open content. Creative Commons also serves to educate the public about issues of copyright, freedom of speech and expression and the public domain.
The CC licences take account of different copyright laws in different countries or jurisdictions and also allow for different language versions. To make the licensing process as simple as possible for users the Creative Commons site makes use of a licence generator that suggests the most appropriate licence based on a user's response to specific questions regarding how their work can be used. In order to facilitate searching for resources licences in a particular way, the CC licence is expressed in three versions:
- Commons deed: this is a plain language version of the licence, with supporting icons (see table below);
- Legal code: the legal fine print that ensure the licence is recognised in a court of law; and
- Digital code: a machine readable translation that allows search engines to identify work by its terms of use (‘About–Creative Commons’; Liang, 2004).
All CC licences include ‘Baseline Rights’: the rights to copy, distribute, display, perform publicly or by digital performance, and to the change the format of the material as a verbatim copy (Hofman & West, 2008, p. 11). In addition, all CC licences assert the author’s right over copyright and the granting of copyright freedoms and require licensees to:
- Obtain permission should they wish to use the resource in a manner that has been restricted;
- Keep the copyright notice intact on all copies of the work;
- Publish the licence with the work or include a link to the licence from any copies of the work;
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