"Creative Commons is both a solution and yet another failure to deal with authorship and copyright on the internet. Discuss and give examples."
Creative Commons is a trendy system for all internet users to deal with authorship and copyright on the internet. Whether the Creative Commons can successfully handle the authorship and copyright problem is still a controversial issue since it was born. Within this essay, the success and failures of the Creative Commons copyright licence will be discussed.
Creative Commons is not-for-profit Corporation, founded in 2001, that encourages the legal distribution, remixing and rebuilding of the intellectual and artistic properties (Creative Commons 2009). The idea behind it came from Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law professor who dedicated to integrate copyright practice and fair use (Williams & Plummer 2009). Through its free copyright licences, individuals can license their creatures without needing copyright lawyers and easily make content available for others in way that benefit everyone, at the same time reserved part of copyright they want (Laura 2005). With approximately 9 years’ development, Creative Commons now is international in scope, having negotiated licenses in more than 40 countries (Williams & Plummer 2009).
There is confusion for most of people on the web that what they can do and can not do with content protected by a traditional “all rights reserved” license (Bailey 2009). However, the content with CC licences added on generates less confusion. The CC offers six different licences, each of that visually identified by single or mixed icons which indicate the core constituent elements of the licences (Creative Commons 2009; McDonald 2006). Thanks to the contribution of those icons, the CC terms and conditions are well explained. This clarity not only makes it easier for creators to express their terms, but for others to follow their wishes, at least in spirit. (Bailey 2009).
The Creative Commons license is an innovative way to deal with the authorship and copyright by offer a choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms. Registering to Creative Commons license can obtain great convenience that authors have a freedom to deal with their authorships and copyrights in choosing what contents they want to share or keep. This is an innovative step of moving away from the traditional restrictive copyright law “All rights reserved”, to “some rights reserved”. Like Laura’s descriptions (2005) for the goals of Creative Commons, “The foundations goal is to build a reasonable copyright that encourages authors, film makers, photographers, and/or musicians to allow others to use their works by opting out of the onerous and burdensome requirements of existing copyright law.” Fitzgerald & Oi (2004) also gives a positive conclusion on the contribution of CC that, “the Creative Commons promote better identification, negotiation and reutilization of content for the purposes of creativity and innovation”.
The first known court case involving a Creative Commons license was taken in Amsterdam on March 9, 2006. The Creative Commons licence was first tested at that time. Local media celebrity Adam Curry sued The Dutch tabloid Weekend for copyright and privacy infringement because Weekend reproduced four of his family photos in a story about Curry’s children without seeking Curry’s prior permission. Those photos are published on the well-known online photo-sharing site Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. Finally, the ruling from Dutch Court rejected a "the license wasn't clear" defense from Weekend. The Weekend was judged to be guilty of violating the terms of the Creative Commons licence that had been applied to Curry’s images (Creative Commons 2006; Groklaw 2006).
This is a successful case for the creators to protect their copyright from infringement through licensing their creatures under CC licence. It is also a proof that the conditions and terms of a creative Commons licence 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 (Groklaw 2006). Simply put, the CC licence is enforceable and has been examined that the creators can get a real copyright protection of content licensing under the CC licence. The Creative Commons can be regarded as an easy solution to deal with copyright and authorship issues.
The simplified way that Creative Commons deal with authorship and copyright still received some criticism and it comes along the development of Creative commons. Tóth (2005) denied the form of CC licence. He mentioned that “The ‘Some rights reserved’ concept is therefore not an alternative to, but rather the very nature of classical copyright”. Another critic Dvorak (2005) use a more pungent language to criticize the Creative Commons. He asserted it does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous "fair use" provisos of existing copyright law. According to these two critics’ opinion, Creative Commons could be seen as a failure to deal with copyright and authorship issues.
The major concern of the Creative Commons is licence misuse. Some copyright holders have experiences that some internet content creators erroneously brand their copyrighted work with Creative Commons licence. This manner is already an infringement of copyright. Apparently, the Creative commons should have responsibilities to check mislicensing and to protect the legal copyrighted work, but it failed to do so.
There is another issue that people announce that Creative Commons is a failure, which is how to earn profit form CC licence. As what can be seen, the Creative Commons pay more attentions to offer convenience to the end-users on the internet, not to the creators. McDonald (2006) is confusing that why a model of giving away the substantial value of copyright is likely to benefit creators who depend on copyright for a significant part of incomes. The concept of the CC licence seems that the creator does not get paid by way of any licence fee. Thus, not getting enough profit for one’s work is already a problem for the Creative commons.
To sum up, Creative Commons is at a phase of developing. This is the reason why the CC licence for copyright causes such much argument that whether it should exist or not. It is not surprising that Creative Commons continuingly bring legal problem to users. However, it is a necessary stage for Creative Commons to grow up. At the current stage, the advantage that CC brings to internet users is over its disadvantages. For a long term consideration, Creative Commons is a solution to deal with the authorship and copyright on the internet.
Bailey, J. (2009), “5 Lesser-Known Benefit to Creative Commons”, retrieved at
http://www.blogherald.com/2009/01/05/5-lesser-known-benefits-to-creative-commons/ , viewed at December 2009
Carroll, M. W. (2005), “Creative Commons and the new intermediaries”, Villanova University School of Law Working Paper Series, The Berkeley Electronic Press, p.34.
Creative Commons (2006), “Creative Commons licenses enforced in Dutch Court”, retrieved at
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823, viewed at December 2009
Delmus E. W. and Karen A. P. (2009), "Tech services on the web", Technical Services Quarterly. 26(4), 402.
Dvorak, J. C. (2005), “Creative Commons Humbug”, retrieved at
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1838244,00.asp , viewed at 9 December 2009
Fitzgerald, B. and Oi, I.(2004), “Free culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons”, Media & law Review, 9, p.137.
Gordon-Murnane, L. (2005), “Generosity and copyright: Creative Commons and Creative Commons search tools”, Searcher, 13(7), pp.16-22.
Groklaw (2006), “Creative Commons License Upheld by Dutch Court”, retrieved at
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060316052623594, viewed at 9 December 2009
McDonald, I.(2006), “Creative commons: Just say ‘CC’?”Copyright Reporter, 24(4), December.
Tóth, P. B. (2005), “Creative Humbug”, retrieved at
http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=118, viewed at December 2009
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