Tag Archives: Creative Commons

Creative Commons Public Domain Mark

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Creative Commons now has a Public Domain Mark designed for designating works for which there is no known copyright for anywhere in the world. In a press release announcing the creation of the Public Domain Mark, Creative Common said,

The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are free of known copyright around the world, primarily old works that are beyond the reach of copyright in all jurisdictions. We have already started mapping the next phases of our public domain work, which will look at ways to identify and mark works that are in the public domain in a limited number of countries.

Creative Commons already has a license for creators to waive all rights for works that are currently covered by copyright in some jurisdiction or another: the CC0 license.

Google Finally Adds Creative Commons Image Search Option

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Google finally added the ability to restrict image searches to only images that are tagged with a Creative Commons license.

This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

Nice.

James Boyle’s New Book ‘The Public Domain’

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Yale University Press has just published James Boyle’s new book about the damage being wreaked by intellectual property laws, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle also has a website for the book at ThePublicDomain.org, where the book can be downloaded for free as a PDF (the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-Sharealike license).

According to the web site,

Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception.

. . .

With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the “range wars of the information age”: today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance.   The “enclosure of the commons of the mind” matters and it matters to all of us. “Boyle has been the godfather of the Free Culture Movement since his extraordinary book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens set the framework for the field a decade ago,” says Lawrence Lessig,  “In this beautifully written and subtly argued book, Boyle has succeeded in resetting that framework, and beginning the work in the next stage of this field. The Public Domain is absolutely crucial to understanding where the debate has been, and where it will go. And Boyle’s work continues to be at the center of that debate.”

Creative Commons License Launch

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Creative Commons finally launched its licenses so people now have a range of choices other than the extremes of putting something in the public domain or asserting complete copyright control over something.

For example, people are regularly writing to ask me to use (sometimes even to quote) things that I have written. As long as they give me credit and it is for noncommercial use, I’m fine with that (in fact, I encourage it — take my content, please). Creative Commons will let me do that using a licensing framework that is a bit more formal.

I’m almost finished with a system so that I can designate which of the 9 Creative Commons licenses I want to apply to a given piece and have that reflected on the site. This is really both the strength and weakness of Conversant.

On the one hand, I don’t have to wait for Seth Dillingham or Macrobyte to create a Creative Commons interface. For this and a wide variety of other uses, I can whip one of my own up relatively quickly using a few macros and some metadata. On the other hand, this wide opened nature of Conversant seems to create a “okay, what do I do next” issue (especially since there are usually multiple ways to accomplish the same thing).

Creative Commons Web Site Goes Live

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The Creative Commons web site went live earlier today. Creative Commons is the project started by Lawrence Lessig and others to make it easy for content creators to easily license their work on terms that are more flexible than existing copyright laws.

The obvious analogy to this is the GPL and similar open source licenses. The cool thing about Creative Commons is that content creators will be able to create a customized license based on just how much and under what circumstances the content creator wants to license his or her work.

There are currently going to be options to license only if the creator is given attribution, only for noncommercial purposes, only if no derivative works are produced, only for private duplication and a copyleft-style provision for redistribution. And content creators will get to pick and choose among those options, so if you want to license something only if you get credit and only for noncommercial uses, you can.

Creative Commons will handle creation of these customized licenses with an online application that will generate the license language as well as generate what Creative Commons calls a “Commons Deed” which is a short, easy to read summary of the licensing scheme (both the deed and the license will be stored at Creative Commons which has plans to create a searchable guide of material using the Creative Commons license).

In the future, Creative Commons hopes to have a machine readable standard for this, so a metadata tag in an online essay would indicate the licensing scheme that the essay is covered by.

This is everything I had hoped Creative Commons would be. When they go live with generating licenses in the Fall, this thing is going to rock.

Lawrence Lessig’s Brilliant Idea

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He’s still wrong about Microsoft, but Lawrence Lessig has a brilliant idea with his Creative Commons initiative (there’s not much at the web site now, but supposedly it will launch in a few months).

The idea is simple — offer intellectual property licenses that are a) relatively airtight and b) allow people to customize the level of control they want to maintain over their creations. Think of it as a DIY copyright. As a profile of Lessig summarized Creative Commons,

In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.

That’s something I’d use immediately. I have a pretty liberal reproduction policy for people who want to reprint things I’ve written, but I’d still like to have a more formal license to protect my rights.