Creative Commons (CC) licensing is a subject that crops up with increasing frequency, particularly in discussions of learning materials and their dissemination on the web. This paper describes features of the Creative Commons project and tries to identify how it might be used by UK further and higher education institutions.
Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, with the help of a grant from the Center for the Public Domain (CPD), a charity which was set up to campaign for reform of intellectual property regimes. They argue that, as legal protection for intellectual property has become stronger and more widely enforced, so the amount of freely available material has diminished, and that this is a brake on creativity and research. They aim to restock this intellectual commons. The Creative Commons tries to further this aim by borrowing some well-established concepts from the world of open source software.
Open source software licences rely on copyright law to achieve their effect. Software that is released under an open source licence belongs to the author. Copyright is maintained by the author, while others are permitted to copy the software, modify its source code and distribute modified versions (as long as they do so under the conditions defined in the licence). The intention behind this form of licensing is to promote further development and use of the software. It also has the beneficial side effect of promoting the skill of the programmer in question.
These outcomes are very similar to the kind of benevolent effects that the pool of material in the public domain had always provided. Folk musicians have always respun old tunes for new ages, and Shakespeare adapted European folk-tales and legends to create his plays. It is easy to see why the CPD was prepared to fund a project like Creative Commons, whose intention was to widen open source licensing concepts to cover all forms of music, visual art, video, scientific data - in short, all forms of content - and to facilitate their free exchange and adaptation without breaching the original creators' copyright.
There are many forms of open source licence. Over 70 have been drafted, reflecting the subtly different aims and concerns of their creators. Naturally, this rich selection can be a little confusing to programmers who are looking to release their work as open source.
Lessig and his companions had the advantage of starting with a clean slate, and thus they were able to pick and choose the features that their licences should incorporate. In this way, it was hoped, some of the confusion surrounding the wide variety of open source licences could be avoided. The Creative Commons lawyers settled upon two core issues borrowed from open source licensing - commercial use and adaptation.
The answer to the first question is a simple yes or no. The second question is slightly more complex. Here, as well as yes and no, the creator can also say yes, but... - specifically yes, but I want any adaptations to be released under this same licence. This stipulation, called Sharealike by Creative Commons, is the direct equivalent of the open source concept known as copyleft, as embodied in, for example, the GNU General Public License. The aim of this slightly tricky condition is to encourage others to adapt and augment your work, while stopping them from taking the result out of the commons. After all, once someone has finished producing a classical arrangement of your techno track, you may want to sample that for your next video art project. Insisting that all adaptations (or derivatives) are licensed under the same licence that you originally chose means that this will always remain possible.
Creative Commons released these licences in late 2002, via their website, http://creativecommons.org, along with a web application that asked the questions mentioned above, and directed the user to their chosen licence depending on their answers. They also developed short, friendly descriptions of each licence for non-lawyers, as well as a series of symbols that encapsulated each licence's features. If you wanted to CC-license your work, you could place these symbols on your web page that linked to the file, and thus provide a simple visual guide to what could be done with your work. To finish the effect, and in neat summary of the entire project, they also provided an additional image to place on your page, featuring the Creative Commons logo and the legend: Some Rights Reserved.
The visual presentation of the licence, although important, is not the only aspect that the Creative Commons project has attended to. Although there is nothing integrally digital about the concept of CC licensing, it is clear that the digital realm, and the Internet in particular, is where most CC-licensed material is going to be obtained. Given this fact, it seems vital that the way a piece of work is licensed can be expressed in a machine-readable form.
The primary way that Creative Commons achieves this is to use the variety of XML known as RDF or Resource Description Framework. When a creator uses the Creative Commons web application to obtain an appropriate licence, they are given a snippet of XML to insert into their web page. This information can be read by search engines, and gathered to create a list of sites that offer material under certain CC licences. Yahoo was the first search engine to offer a CC-specific search facility, although currently Google offers this too. There are also specific search engines for music, photographs, video, etc.
Every Creative Commons licence has three representations (of one and the same licence): a deed, which contains a plain language explanation of the licence's intention (along with the handy symbols), the full lawyer-drafted licence, and a machine-readable metadata snippet.
Creative Commons also provides a selection of other licences. For example, the Creative Commons CC0 - described as 'no rights reserved' - handles the case in which a creator wishes to explicitly give up their ownership of a piece of work so that it may be used without complication by anyone for anything. The open source software licences known as the GNU General Public License and the GNU Lesser General Public License also exist in a Creative Commons-wrapped form (the legal text of these licences remains completely unaltered, but they are accompanied by a corresponding CC deed and metadata snippet).
In addition to these licences, Creative Commons launched an extremely ambitious project in early 2005, known as Science Commons, http://sciencecommons.org/. Science Commons, of which there are now sub-projects including Health Commons, aims to investigate the current intellectual property status of scientific data. CC is concerned that, with increased pressure on universities to fund themselves through the commercialisation of their scientific research, there has been a gradual erosion of the basic principles of the free distribution of datasets and aims to address this.
Creative Commons began as an American project. The initial licences that the project produced were all written to accord with US law. But the desire to have clear open content licences extends well beyond the USA. Soon requests for regionalised versions of the licences were being widely voiced. On the face of it, this was a very reasonable request. Still, there were issues with it.
Firstly, the work involved would be gigantic. Secondly, it would produce a swathe of regionalised licences that would all have to do exactly the same thing. Making sure that they actually did the same thing would be immensely difficult, given the variations in copyright law around the world. It is for this reason that open source software licences like the GPL are not regionalised: the uncertainty of interpreting a US-drafted licence in foreign jurisdictions was felt to be less risky than creating a set of regionalised licences that may or may not be identical legally, and could be attacked individually in their respective regions. Far better to have just one licence, and thus have a large and international interest group of licensors who would all fight to oppose an attack in any jurisdiction.
Despite these difficulties, groups of lawyers in many jurisdictions worked to generate regionalised versions of the licences. Many of these have now been completed, and can be selected at the CC website as alternatives to the US generic legal code. Of course, the CC deed and the metadata remain essentially unchanged - it is only the legal expression of the licence that is regionalised.
Many individuals and organisations have already made use of the Creative Commons licences. Organisations such as OpenContent in the USA have been promoting the release of educational materials under open licences since the late 1990s. OpenContent had even produced their own Open Publication License. Educational establishments such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University and The Open University in the UK have released learning materials under Creative Commons licences. In May 2004 the BBC announced that it intended to make much material from its archives available under an open licence. A pilot project, called the BBC Creative Archive, launched in early 2005 with a licence modelled very closely on the Creative Commons licence (the BBC argues that they are obliged to impose additional restrictions, such as clearly stating that they do not endorse adapted versions of their material); the pilot ended in 2006.
More and more material is becoming available under CC licences. Much of this material is potentially suitable for building into learning materials, both digital and analogue. Whereas in the past a teacher might have grabbed an image from the web and include it in some material without fully knowing whether they were legally permitted to do so, Creative Commons provides a way of obtaining such material in a codified and legal manner. This in turn makes the reuse and archiving of the learning materials as a whole much easier and more worry-free. As mentioned above, fully realised learning materials have also been made available by some institutions. The JISC-funded OpenCourseWare Consortium, a collection of courses available to learners throughout the world, illustrates how Creative Commons can benefit the global academic community.
The other side of the coin - publishing your own material under a CC licence - is relatively simple. However, there is a simple caveat. Although it might seem obvious, it is worth stressing that in order to license a piece of work, you must actually own it. Most employees will not own the creative work that they generate at work; it will belong to their employer. Although an employer may be happy for a teacher or research officer to use materials that have been made available by others under a CC licence, it should not be assumed that this means they will be happy to have their own resultant works published in the same way. An employee must get overt permission from their employer before releasing their work. This remains true even if the work contains some bits and pieces obtained under a CC licence. Just because you have used an image that is licensed as Sharealike, it does not mean that you must release your work under a CC licence. Your work can be used internally within your employer's establishment and never be released at all. However, if it is released to others outside the establishment, the Sharealike condition comes into force and a CC Sharealike licence must be used. Early consultation with your employer will ensure that these problems do not arise, and that the full benefit of the use of CC materials can be had without untoward legal problems.
The Creative Commons website [http://creativecommons.org/] provides an easy portal to obtaining and releasing CC licensed material, and also points users to other projects, like the Internet Archive, which can help with hosting CC materials on the web.
It is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales licence.
OSS Watch is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.