(CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work.

Aim

The Creative Commons licenses enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright owners can use when releasing their works on the Web. It also provides metadata that describes the license and the work, making it easier to process and locate licensed works.

All these efforts are done to counter the effects of what Creative Commons considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. In the words of Lawrence Lessig, -founder of Creative Commons and former Chairman of the Board-, it

is “a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”. 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.

History

The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The GFDL was intended mainly as a license for software documentation, but is also in active use by non-software projects such as Wikipedia. Both licenses contained optional parts that, in the opinions of critics, made them less “free”. The GFDL differs from the CC licenses in its requirement that the licensed work be distributed in a form which is “transparent”, i.e., not in a proprietary and/or confidential format.

Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig. The initial set of Creative Commons licenses was published on December 16, 2002 and 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.

The Creative Commons 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 NonCommercial 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 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.”
Common Content was set up by Jeff Kramer with cooperation from Creative Commons, and is currently maintained by volunteers.

Tools for discovering CC-licensed content

• Creative Commons’ Search Page
• Creative Commons’ Content Directories
• Yahoo’s Creative Commons Search
• Google Advanced Search – select an option under Usage Rights, to search for CC content.
• Common Content – now offline (accessed 16 November 2007).
• Mozilla Firefox web browser with default Creative Commons search functionality
• The Internet Archive – Project dedicated to maintaining an archive of multimedia resources, among which Creative Commons-licensed content
• Ourmedia – Media archive supported by the Internet Archive
• ccHost – Server web software used by ccmixter and Open Clip Art Library
• MusiCC – “Your Free Social Booking”

Photos and images

• Everystockphoto.com – Search engine and member bookmarking for Creative Commons Photos
• Open Clip Art Library

Criticism

During its first year as an organization, Creative Commons experienced a “honeymoon” period with very little criticism. Recently, however, critical attention has focused on the Creative Commons movement and how well it is living up to its perceived values and goals. The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into complaints of a lack of:

• A political position – Where the object is to critically analyze the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an eminent critique. One of the more notable concerns to be found in this vein of criticism is on the role the Creative Commons plays as an unconcerned corporate filter. As mentioned in Martin Hardie and “Creative License Fetishism”, “When one examines closely just exactly what sort of ‘freedom’ is ultimately to be had within these licenses, one is quick to discover that they are primarily set up as tools meant to feed directly into corporate co-option.”
• A common sense position – These usually fall into the category of “it is not needed” or “it takes away user rights”
• A pro-copyright position – These are usually marshalled by the content industry and argue either that Creative Commons is not useful, or that it undermines copyright (Nimmer 2005).

Another criticism is that it worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible. Most notably, ‘attribution-sharealike’ and ‘attribution-noncommercial-sharealike’ are incompatible, meaning works cannot be created that combine material from both.

Information taken from the wikipedia.