Creative Commons is a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding the range of creative works available to others for legal use and distribution. The organization has issued several copyright licenses. They are free to the public. Allow authors to communicate which rights they assign to themselves and which are alienated in favor of the recipients. Easy-to-understand explanation of rights on one page with corresponding visual symbols.
Licenses
Creative commons, or a standard license, replaces the individual negotiation of specific rights between the owner - licensor and licensee, which are necessary for managing copyright. The application of a standardized license for reuse cases where commercial compensation is not provided is sought by the owner. The result is a flexible, low-cost copyright management mode that benefits both owners and licensees.
History
The organization was founded by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred with the assistance of the Public Domain Center. The first set was released in December 2002. The founding management team that developed the license and created the CC infrastructure as we know it today included Molly Schaffer Van Howling, Glenn Otis Brown, Niru Pahariya and Ben Adida.
In 2002, the Open Content Project, a project by the predecessor of David A. Wiley, announced Creative Commons as a successor, and Wiley joined as director of CC.
As of May 2018, about 1.4 billion works have been licensed, with more than 415 million photos posted on Flickr alone.
Creative Commons is regulated by the board of directors. Their licenses have been accepted by many as a way for creators to take control of how they choose to share their work of authorship.
goal
The creative commons attribution license - reuse allowed - has been described as being at the forefront of a copyright movement that seeks to support the creation of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to automatic copyright. David Berry and Giles Moss credit Creative Commons for showing interest in the issue of intellectual property and for helping to rethink the role of the “common commons” in the “information age”. In addition, CC provided “institutional and legal support to individuals and groups who wish to experiment more freely and communicate with culture.”
Principles
Creative Commons is trying to counter the entertainment industry, which is increasingly dominating and restricting creative activity. Lessig describes this as:
A culture in which creators can only be created with the permission of powerful corporations or creators from the past.
Lessig argues that:
Modern culture is dominated by standard content distributors to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural types of products such as pop music and movies, and that CC can provide alternatives to these restrictions.
Criticism
All current CC licenses (except for the Public Public Dedication tool) require attribution, which may be inconvenient for materials based on many other works. Critics feared that Creative Commons might eventually destroy the system or allow “some of our most valuable resources — the creativity of individuals” to be thrown into the public domain for use by anyone with free time and a magic marker.
Critics also worried that the lack of remuneration for content producers would discourage artists from publishing their work, and doubted whether Creative Commons was the common property that it was.
Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, objected that copyright laws do not always provide strong and seemingly vague protection. It is given by today's law. Rather, copyright was limited to a much shorter time frame, and some works never received protection because they did not follow the now abandoned mandatory format.
Accompanying Debian, the GNU and Linux distribution, known for its strong commitment to the definition of software freedom, rejected the Creative Commons Attribution license to version 3 as incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guide (DFSG) because of the anti-DRM license (which may for ambiguity, cover more than DRM), and its requirement that downstream users remove the author’s credit upon request from the author. Version 3.0 of Creative Commons solved these problems, and with the exception of non-commercial options, it is considered compatible with DFSG.
Kent Anderson, who writes for The Scholarly Kitchen, a science publishing community blog, criticizes CC for being copyright-dependent and not really giving up on it as more complex than the last. Thus, the public does not reflect on CC reflexively, accepting it as a software license, while weakening the permissions granted by copyright. As a result, Anderson comes to the conclusion that this is the essence of “Creative Commons receives significant funding from large information companies such as Google, the Nature Publishing Group and RedHat”, that Google’s money is especially connected with the history of CC. For him, CC is "an organization designed to advance the interests of technology companies and Silicon Valley as a whole."
License Distribution and Incompatibility
Mako Hill stated that CC is unable to establish an “initial level of freedom”, which all CC licenses and absolutely all licensors and users must comply with:
“Unable to take an ethical position and draw a line of missed opportunity, CC replaced what could be a call for a world in which“ fundamental rights cannot be restored ”with a relatively empty call“ some rights reserved. ”
He also argued that the creative commons' reuse permitted "license degrades their use by providing several incompatible rights.
License abuse
The Creative Commons license channel is only a service provider for a standardized license text, not a party to any agreement. Attackers can mark copyrighted works of legal copyright holders with CC and re-upload these works to the Internet. No central database of Creative Commons works controls all licensed works. Responsibility for the system lies entirely with those who use licenses. This situation, however, is not characteristic of Creative Commons. All copyright holders must individually protect them. And there is no central database of copyrighted works or existing licensing agreements. The U.S. Copyright Office maintains a database of all products registered in it, but a lack of registration does not mean a lack of copyright.
Criticism of Nonprofit License
Eric Meller expressed concern about using the non-commercial Creative Commons license. The works distributed with its help are incompatible with many sites with open content, including Wikipedia, which explicitly permits and encourages certain types of commercial use. Meller explained that "the people who are likely to suffer from the -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications such as blogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers."
Lessig replied that the current copyright regime also harms compatibility and that the creators of the work can reduce this incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license. In addition, a non-profit license is useful to prevent the author from benefiting from the work when he is still planning to do so in the future. They were also criticized for being too vague about which use is considered “commercial” and “non-commercial”.
Judicial Precedents
Great Minds, a non-profit educational publisher who issued works under the -NC license, sued FedEx for violating it because the school used its services to mass produce photocopies of the work, thereby commercially using the product. A US judge dismissed the case in February 2017, deciding that FedEx was an intermediary and that granting a license “does not limit the ability of the licensee to use third parties to exercise the rights granted.” Great Minds appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the second circuit later that year. The second district confirmed the decision of the lower court in March 2018, concluding that FedEx does not infringe copyrights and does not violate the license. One of the district judges, Susan L. Carney, stated in a court statement:
We believe that in the absence of any clear licensing language, on the contrary, licensees can use third-party agents, such as commercial reproduction services, to facilitate their own permitted non-commercial use. Because FedEx acted as a simple agent for licensed school districts when it reproduced Great Minds materials, and since there is no doubt that the school districts themselves sought to use Great Minds materials for acceptable purposes, we conclude that FedEx did not violate the license or copyright Great Minds rights.
Human personality
In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched an advertising campaign at the bus stop, which advertised a text messaging service on mobile phones, using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to the Flickr site for photo sharing using a creative commons license with attribution. Users licensing their images in this way freed up their work for use by any other person if credit was attributed to the original creator without any other compensation. Virgin approved this only restriction by typing the URL leading to the photographer’s Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one of the pictures depicts 15-year-old Alison Chang, who poses for the photographer at a sink dedicated to raising funds in her church, with the imposing mocking slogan Dump Your Pen Friend. Chang sued Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. The picture was taken by Chang’s church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wi-Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
It depends on confidentiality, the right of people not to use their semblance in advertising without permission. Thus, although Mr. Wong may have given his rights as a photographer, he did not refuse and could not give up Alison's rights. The lawsuit, in which Mr. Wong is a party, argues that Virgin has not complied with all the conditions of a non-restrictive license.
On November 27, 2007, Chang filed a petition to voluntarily reject the lawsuit against Creative Commons, focusing on their claim against Virgin Mobile. The case was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction, and subsequently Virgin Mobile did not incur any losses in relation to the plaintiff.