Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public.

These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons licenses use icons and plain language so that creators can make their intentions clear and users can be assured that their use of the work is legal.

These types of licenses help people understand if, and if so, how to use, share, or develop the work. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

Name

Derived from creative, author; commons, communities, ordinary people (people) and their property, the legal right of joint ownership.

In 1968 the economist Garrett Hardin published an article entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he sharply interprets one of the most debated economic and social dilemmas. According to Hardin, communities, that is, those things that belong to no one but can be used by all, are always doomed to a sad end. He uses the metaphor of shepherds having a common plot of land on which they all have the right to graze their cows. According to Hardin, it is in each shepherd's interest to graze as many cows as possible on that land, even if it ends up hurting the community. The shepherd gets all the benefits of the extra cow, while the harm to the community is shared by the whole group. However, if all the shepherds make an individually rational decision, the community will be destroyed and all the shepherds will suffer.

As Italian lawyer and researcher Simone Aliprandi, author of numerous books on copyleft and open culture, writes in Creative Commons: a user guide, "Creative Commons theorists, most notably Lawrence Lessig, argue instead that in the case of goods such as creative and intellectual products, this problem does not exist because each work increases its social value as more people can benefit from it. Moreover, these goods are not prone to deterioration or natural scarcity, because human creativity knows no bounds." "Thus, we can rightly speak of a 'comedy of commons' where the goods affected are precisely creative commons," Simone Aliprandi concludes.

Purpose and Impact

The purpose of Creative Commons is to allow copyright holders to transfer some of the rights to their works to the public, while at the same time retaining other rights. The point is that according to the current copyright laws in most countries of the world all rights, both proprietary and non-proprietary, belong to the authors automatically. Creative Commons makes it possible to transfer some rights to the public through a family of ready-made licenses recognized by the legal laws of many countries.

Creative Commons' official "Reticulum Rex" video (2003) talks about the project's plans to "bring a share of common sense to the copyright dispute. Become a partner in copyright and figure out what rules to create by. To help authors create a space of free culture from which they can draw inspiration. It is also stated that there are plans to "build our philosophy and licenses into the structure of the web" (which they have succeeded in doing - license search is supported by Google and supported by Yahoo!), to "break down the barriers between reader and author, between listener and composer, audience and performer, society and citizen, culture and creator, to revive creativity and with your help keep growing and becoming like Mr. Copywriting".

Creative Commons has been described as an organization at the forefront of the copyleft movement that seeks to support the creation of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to automatic copyright on an "all rights reserved" basis, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Gilles Moss point to Creative Commons as an organization producing interest in the question of intellectual property and helping to redefine the role of "common property" in the "information age." In addition, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate more freely with culture.

Creative Commons works to counter a "permissive culture" that tends to be dominant and increasingly restrictive. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which authors begin to create only with the permission of an authority or author from the past. Lessig argues that contemporary culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and reinforce their monopoly on cultural products such as popular music and popular movies, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

The founders of Creative Commons argued that extending legal protection for intellectual property (like the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act to extend copyright for 20 years) could discourage creativity and innovation.

Name

Derived from creative, author; commons, communities, ordinary people (people) and their property, the legal right of joint ownership.

In 1968 the economist Garrett Hardin published an article entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he sharply interprets one of the most debated economic and social dilemmas. According to Hardin, communities, that is, those things that belong to no one but can be used by all, are always doomed to a sad end. He uses the metaphor of shepherds having a common plot of land on which they all have the right to graze their cows. According to Hardin, it is in each shepherd's interest to graze as many cows as possible on that land, even if it ends up hurting the community. The shepherd gets all the benefits of the extra cow, while the harm to the community is shared by the whole group. However, if all the shepherds make an individually rational decision, the community will be destroyed and all the shepherds will suffer.

As Italian lawyer and researcher Simone Aliprandi, author of numerous books on copyleft and open culture, writes in Creative Commons: a user guide, "Creative Commons theorists, most notably Lawrence Lessig, argue instead that in the case of goods such as creative and intellectual products, this problem does not exist because each work increases its social value as more people can benefit from it. Moreover, these goods are not prone to deterioration or natural scarcity, because human creativity knows no bounds." "Thus, we can rightly speak of a 'comedy of commons' where the goods affected are precisely creative commons," Simone Aliprandi concludes.

Purpose and Impact

The purpose of Creative Commons is to allow copyright holders to transfer some of the rights to their works to the public, while at the same time retaining other rights. The point is that according to the current copyright laws in most countries of the world all rights, both proprietary and non-proprietary, belong to the authors automatically. Creative Commons makes it possible to transfer some rights to the public through a family of ready-made licenses recognized by the legal laws of many countries.

Creative Commons' official "Reticulum Rex" video (2003) talks about the project's plans to "bring a share of common sense to the copyright dispute. Become a partner in copyright and figure out what rules to create by. To help authors create a space of free culture from which they can draw inspiration. It is also stated that there are plans to "build our philosophy and licenses into the structure of the web" (which they have succeeded in doing - license search is supported by Google and supported by Yahoo!), to "break down the barriers between reader and author, between listener and composer, audience and performer, society and citizen, culture and creator, to revive creativity and with your help keep growing and becoming like Mr. Copywriting".

Creative Commons has been described as an organization at the forefront of the copyleft movement that seeks to support the creation of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to automatic copyright on an "all rights reserved" basis, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Gilles Moss point to Creative Commons as an organization producing interest in the question of intellectual property and helping to redefine the role of "common property" in the "information age." In addition, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate more freely with culture.

Creative Commons works to counter a "permissive culture" that tends to be dominant and increasingly restrictive. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which authors begin to create only with the permission of an authority or author from the past. Lessig argues that contemporary culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and reinforce their monopoly on cultural products such as popular music and popular movies, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

The founders of Creative Commons argued that extending legal protection for intellectual property (like the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act to extend copyright for 20 years) could discourage creativity and innovation.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the support of Center for the Public Domain.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public.

These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons licenses use icons and plain language so that creators can make their intentions clear and users can be assured that their use of the work is legal.

These types of licenses help people understand if, and if so, how to use, share, or develop the work. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the support of Center for the Public Domain.