Creative Commons ipnm2007 Kaido Kikkas

Creative Commons

• IPNM2007

• Kaido Kikkas

Birth of free content

• Earlier: mostly software

• Early examples:

• RFC
• Project Gutenberg
• fanfiction.net

• At the end of the XX century – the new media boom: e-learning, telework, network media, social software et

• Growing need for new regulations

GNU FDL

• GPL can be used for other content, but the main problem is – what is the “source”?

• 1999 – GNU Free Documentation License

• mostly for technical documentation

• The largest user is Wikipedia

• Problems:

• lawyer language
• too extensive
• prevents DRM etc (well before GPL 3!)

More efforts

• 1999 - Open Publication License by David Wiley's Open Content Project

• did not break through

• The Free Art License

• the source problem like in GPL

CC

• 2001 – created by Lawrence Lessig

• 2002 – first set of licenses

• Middle-of-the-road: “some rights reserved”

• Author's overrule principle

• Initially somewhat US-centric (copyright!)

• Too “non-free” for FSF

• Does not mix with GPL and FDL

Main points

• Human language

• Simple web-based choice

• 3 documents:

• Commons Deed (human language)
• Full legal text (lawyer language)
• RDF/XML metadata for machine reading

Choice in four questions

• Allow commercial uses of the work? (Y/N)

• Allow modifications of the work? (Yes; Yes, as long as others share alike; No)

• Jurisdiction of your license (localised or unported)

• Format of the work (Audio; Video; Image; Text; Interactive; Other)

Main licenses

• Attribution (BY)

• Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA)

• Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC)

• Attribution-NoDerivs (BY-ND)

• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND)

Sampling

• Sampling - partial usage is allowed in all purposes but advertisement, while the entire object will remain under full copyright

• Sampling Plus - the former plus allows the non-commercial use of the entire object (like BY-NC-SA)

• NonCommercial Sampling Plus - both partial and full use is only allowed noncommercially (in essence the BY-NC-SA complemented with a sampling clause)

Others

• Public Domain

• CC GNU GPL

• CC GNU LGPL

Sensible copyright

• Founders' Copyright – the original 14+14

• DevNations: the dual license

• for the poor (UN DevNations) – CC BY
• for the rich – full copyright

Problems

• (typical whine - “how can you earn?”)

• Copyright vs droit d'auteur

• Legal compatibility (esp. with GPL)

• Localisation

Final words

• Perhaps the most used “middle approach”

• Has greatly helped to popularise free culture

• Acceptable to many people suspicious towards GPL and others

• The current US focus and localisation need to be addressed