Scholarly Communication News: What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means

by Matt Safford

At the turn of the millennium, Stanford law professor and cyber-law expert Lawrence Lessig had an idea.

In the midst of a Supreme Court case arguing that the latest lengthening of American copyright laws was unconstitutional, Lessig decided that if he couldn't stop the strengthening of copyright law, which was extended by an additional twenty years in 1998, he would help create an alternative.

In 2001, Lessig and a board of directors founded a non-profit organization called Creative Commons, to create legal licenses that expanded the options of traditional copyright laws, enabling users to selectively allow use of their works by others. Loosely based on earlier ideas already popular online, such as open-source software, the first six licenses were released via the Creative Commons website in December of 2002.

Five years later, the Commons pool of content contains more than 60 million individual works. From Bangladeshi blogs to Flikr photos from Fresno, Creative Commons has been embraced by recording artists, filmmakers, code writers, and other content creators who believe that collective culture benefits when creative minds build upon the ideas of others. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia, and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, says that Creative Commons' real power is in its ability to inform users.

"It gives creators who never went to law school the vocabulary they need to work through the copyright system," says Vaidhyanathan. "It lets creators understand that copyright is not one right; it's a bundle of rights. And that if you create a work, you have the ability to let the world use it in useful and beneficial ways."

But the concept isn't all free love and file-sharing. Using Creative Commons licenses, content producers can release their work into the public domain, for anyone to cut up, mash up, or mark up. Or they can simply allow people to distribute it as a whole, without the ability to alter it. The other licenses fall somewhere in-between, but all require attribution, so creators get the credit they're due.

That isn't to say all users of Creative Commons give their content away for free. Though many allow for free non-commercial use, they commonly restrict commercial use. And the "sampling plus" license, popular among musicians, lets other recording artists sample pieces of their work, while still allowing the original musicians to sell their albums. But the bulk of Creative Commons-licensed content comes from bloggers, who are largely more interested in traffic and relevance than sales.

"Most text on the web doesn't have a price tag attached to it, so there's no big corporate regime with accountants worried about the idea of giving anything away free," says Vaidhyanathan. "Secondly, it's real easy to tag text on the web with a little Creative Commons [button] and if people are curious about it, they click on it and they find out. It really is remarkably easy for that medium. It's a little bit more challenging for things like video and music."

"Commons' license can mean exposure

Still, many recording artists, frustrated over the way copyright laws have stifled sampling over the last fifteen years, are embracing Creative Commons and releasing their music under a license that specifically allows their music to be sampled.

Chris Randall, former front man of the band Sister Machine Gun and founder of Positron Records, released his last three albums under Creative Commons' Sample Plus license. He lets other artists on his label release content under Creative Commons, and so far has yet to meet any strong resistance from his label mates. In fact, he says, once he explains it to them, they're pretty open to the idea, because it can provide them a different type of exposure.

"People that do internet radio as a hobby, rather than a business, tend to seek out Creative Commons-licensed music," says Randall. "So we do get some exposure that way, that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise."

Contrary to the actions of the major record labels, Positron also uses Creative Commons to expressly allow fans to upload songs onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, as long as they are properly labeled, so that the artist gets credit.

Randall doesn't see this as a threat to his sales. Indeed he sells CDs directly on his site, along with digital downloads through iTunes and other download sites. He thinks the major labels that spend millions trying to curb piracy on the internet are fighting a futile battle.

"The way I see it, there are people in this world that pay for things and people that try to get over. And the people of this world that try to get over are gonna get over no matter what you do," says Randall. "So why fight it, you know?"

All the label's albums are released under Creative Commons, and Randall says it's getting easier to convince other musicians to release their music under Creative Commons.

To Vaidhyanathan, this isn't surprising at all. "The artists seem to get it better than the intermediaries," says Vaidhyanathan. "Right now I'm currently negotiating a couple different book contracts, and I'm trying to get my publishers to let me release the works under a Creative Commons license…I have to make those arguments fresh every time. Because a lot of people in those industries are not as well versed in the ways these things work, as, say, the Beastie Boys or David Byrne are."

Film, literature see benefits

Those musicians, along with best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem, are a few of the "stars" that have embraced Creative Commons, or in Letham's case a derivation of the idea. The author is selling film and theater production rights to several of his short stories for $1 apiece, and giving away the film rights to his last novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. With more mainstream talent embracing these ideas, Vaidhyanathan says Creative Commons could become the default method of distributing cultural products.

But until that happens, if it ever does, getting Creative Commons licenses translated into as many languages and legal jurisdictions as possible is the next phase in the process, and it's already well underway. There are currently 34 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with nine other jurisdictions in the drafting process, according to the Creative Commons website.

Countries around the world are beginning to use Creative Commons to promote and distribute content. A Creative Commons photography contest just wrapped up in mainland China. And a Dutch court last year ruled a Creative Commons license legally binding in a lawsuit brought by former MTV host Adam Curry against a Dutch newspaper that printed Creative Commons-licensed photos of Curry's daughter, which were posted on his Flickr account.

Along with the challenge of globalizing the concept, Vaidhyanathan sees people's resistance to Creative Commons as a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one.

"I'm pretty sure that all of this sort of emotional reaction to Creative Commons as some sort of hippy, anarchistic movement, is going to go away," says Vaidhyanathan. "People are going to realize that it is a sort of down to earth business tool that actually helps communities of creators do their work together, and reflects how creativity actually happens. I think that's going to be step number one."