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
NOTE
- ↑ 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.
