Essay 2

A World of Reposting, Sharing, and… Copy Right Protection?

We live in a world where information, pictures, and videos can be shared at the click of a button. This is a world where things are liked, reposted, and favorited minutes after uploaded. We live in a world where private is a dirty word and where all our information is public. Our world is one where a single person’s intellectual information can reach thousands. One would think this would think this is a great world we’re living in, and it is, but there this growing idea that our intellectual information needs protection. Sometimes there is too much protection and the rest of the world cannot benefit from our ideas. That is where Creative Commons comes in. It is a non-profit organization working to find a balance in-between strict copy right laws and free public use. Creative Commons is fast growing and used by some of the most widely known companies today. Its easy to understand licenses make the organization also accessible to the common individual and I believe its share-alike license is one that we should model many more copy right licenses after.    

                The Creative Commons organization was founded in 2001, but the first set of copy right licenses weren’t released until December 2002. The organization was founded by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the help of Center for the Public Domain (Creative Commons Wikipedia). It is now run by a board of directors and composed of entrepreneurs, experts, philanthropists, and legal scholars to name a few (History- Creative Commons). Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida were some of the people responsible for developing the licenses and infrastructure of Creative Commons early on (Creative Commons Wikipedia). In 2003 there were approximately one million licenses under Creative Commons and by 2008 it was estimated that Creative Commons held 130 million licenses under their name (History- Creative Commons). It is an organization that grew quickly and is still growing to this day. Their licenses have been greatly improved upon and imported to over 50 jurisdictions (History- Creative Commons).

                The purpose of the Creative Commons is basically for individuals or companies to choose how much or how little of their intellectually information that they want under copy right. This is an alternative to the broad “all rights reserved”. Creative Commons allows the licensor to keep their copy right, but grant the public the right to share, copy, and use their work non-commercially (About the Licenses). This organization works alongside the copy right to allow licensors to “decide how they want their work to be used” (About the Licenses). Creative Commons is somewhat limited though. The licenses do not influence the freedoms given by the law to the users of creative works. Creative Commons depends on the permission from the licensor to allow the user to do anything that the law reserves exclusively to the licensor (About the Licenses). CC cannot go around the law, but it can help to bridge the strict copy right laws with a license that is more lenient. The video below explains how CC allows us to make a choice about how we want to share our work.

         A Creative Commons copy right license comes in a three layer design. The first is called the “Legal Code”.  This is “in the kind of language and text formats most lawyers know and love” (About the Licenses). Unfortunately, the normal person does not understand this; for that the organization includes the Common Deeds layer. This layer summarizes the most important items within the contract in ways that people can understand. The last layer is in a format easy for the machine to read. This is the layer that allows software systems and search engines to understand. This three layer system insures that the license is “something that the creators of works can understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand” (About the Licenses).

                A few of the big users of Creative Commons are Al Jazeera, Flickr, and Google. Jazeera used CC so that they could post footage of the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Most Western Media did not have the access that Al Jazeera had (Who Uses CC?). Their footage was then more effective and eye-opening and now users can freely use it as long as they give permission to Al Jazeera.  The link below shows a video that explains Al Jazeera's inspiration by Lessig to make their content open to the public with CC. Flickr also has a Creative Commons License so that their users can upload and share other users’ images. There are now over 200 million users, making Flickr the largest amount of licensed content (Who Uses CC?). Google uses CC in a variety of ways, one being that they allow their users to CC-license their own work through them. Also, YouTube, which is owned by Google, has added a CC licensing option for video uploads (Who Uses CC?). This shows that a lot of well-known companies use CC and for a variety of different reasons, but overall to balance the amount of control the public has over their intellectual property.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrdFseDD_Ik

               
           Creative Commons has many types of licenses such as attribution, non-comercial, and no derivative works, but the one I fine most accessible is share-alike. According the Creative Commons website under this license you are allowed to, “share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format, as well as adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially”(Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic). The user must give credit to the creator though. They must also give a link to the license agreement and express if any changes have been made. Also, if the user makes any changes they must put up their work under the same conditions/license as the original creator (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic). In summary the user can use the creators work in any way they choose as long as they give credit and allow others to use their newly created work in the same way. Personally I feel this is the fairest license. This allows the creator to keep their copy right because they still get credit for their work, but also allows others to benefit from their work. This copy right enables users the share the creators work, but requires them to let others to freely use their work as well. I feel this is basically how our internet works today and is the most familiar template for the public to work off of.

We live in a world where mass amounts of information, videos, and pictures are at our fingertips. This is a world where people can popularize their ideas with the touch of the upload button. We live in a world where copyright is a dirty word and sharing is preferred. We live in a world where we want our ideas to be known and used, but also protected. Creative Commons allows this once paradox to become a possibility. Many companies, organizations, and individuals take advantage of CC’s easy to understand, flexible version of copyright. Creative Commons is helping us toward a world that allows the mass circulation of ideas to be shared, used, and built upon, while still keeping copy rights. This is truly the best of both worlds! 

Works Cited

http://creativecommons.org/who-uses-cc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
http://creativecommons.org/about/history
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/