Perspectives in Digital Culture/Creative Commons and Participation

Creative Commons and Participation

Introduction

Creative Commons was conceived as way of modernising copyright laws when it became apparent that they had becoming outdated, having been set up for the media and creativity of the 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century, a 'digital infrastructure' existed which allowed for 'a wide range of sharing, remixing and publishing'. In co-founder Lawrence Lessig's 2007 TED talk 'Laws That Choke Creativity', Lessig clarified, "It's important to emphasise that what this is not, is not what we call 'piracy'. I'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other peoples content in whole-sale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner. I'm talking about people taking and recreating, using other peoples content, using digital technologies to say things differently."

Creative Commons is described by Lessig as a nonprofit organisation which provides copyright licenses to artists who can directly control what level of freedom they wish their work to have, writing it should be thought of as 'not "All Rights Reserved" but "Some Rights Reserved"'. The concern of the Creative Commons co-founders was that a conflict between traditional copyright and digital media usage would result in copyright being either further tightened or abolition, and so sought a middle ground. The Creative Commons website explains, 'Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs." Instead of adding to or supporting Open Content licenses already in existence, Lessig stated it was important to develop a new one because they felt it was important for artists to be able to understand their own licenses, stating they needed to be 'human-readable [but also] legally enforceable'.

Creative Commons provides a variety of licenses to suit the needs of the creators using them.(see below). While a strong emphasis is placed by Lessig on openness and free culture, he also acknowledges that there can also be a need for stricter control over works. He sighted, as an example, a Davis Guggenheim film which was filmed in a school and featured children. The filmmaker felt a need to protect the people featured in the film and so opted for the most restrictive of the licenses available. Lessig stated that the licenses allow for artists to choses one which reflects their personal values.

As of 2014, there are 882 million works and nine million websites using Creative Commons licenses. Websites which use Creative Commons include YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr and Scribd

Main Concepts

Types of licenses

Each license has a 'three-layer' design. They begin with a Legal Code, with the kind of text and language mostly understood by lawyers. A more accessible version is the 'human-readable' format, which summarises the most important terms and conditions in an easily understood way. Finally there is the 'machine-readable' format, with a summary being written in a way that search engines and other forms of technology will be able to understand.

Current Licenses

Each of the available licenses available under Creative Commons has the same general principles. They all have the purpose of ensuring that creators get the credit that they deserve for their work, whilst also letting others make use of it. The licenses all work worldwide and last for as long as applicable. There are six different licenses with slight variations, allowing the creator to choose the one that best suits their needs.

Attribution (CC BY) The most accommodating of all the options, this license allows others to distribute and build upon the original work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) This license is similar to Attribution, with the additional point that anyone who uses your work must license their work under identical terms. It is often compared with Copyleft, and is the method that is adopted by Wikipedia in protecting their work.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) Under this license users are allowed to redistribute your work both commercially and non-commercially, provided that it is left unchanged and credited to the original creator.

Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) Others are allowed to build upon your work non-commercially, and although they must acknowledge your original work they do not need to license their creation under the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-CA) This license allows people to remix your work non-commercially, as long as they license their creation under identical terms and credit you for the original work.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) The most restrictive option, this license allows others to download and share your works provided that they give you credit. However, it does not allow them to use them commercially or to edit them in any way.

Although it's not officially a license, Creative Commons also operates CC Zero (CC0) a legal tool which allows users to completely surrender copyright rights and place their work in the public domain. This is also an option for those who had copyright and want to remove it from their work. The law makes it almost impossible to completely waive copyright, and so this tool is an option which may be used instead.

Retired Licenses

Lawrence Lessig has always believed in the need to keep the family of licenses as simple as possible. As a result of this a number of licenses have been removed over the years, largely due to lack of demand. The URLs for the licenses still exist, meaning that any existing work can still maintain the same license. However, they will not be offered to any future works.

Sampling+ - This license was retired in 2011 as it was incompatible with other CC licenses, and there was a lack of demand.

NonCommercial-Sampling+

Public Domain Dedication and Certification

DevNations

Sampling

In addition, all licenses lacking the Attribution element were also retired.

Projects

Education

Regarding Creative Common's educational involvement, CC are ultimately responsible for minimising restrictive copyright laws and incompatible technologies that may limit access to educational resources. Their main aim is to support open educational resources (OER) and the benefits associated with these, and CC do this by ensuring that when educational resources are digitised and fully licensed by CC, they are therefore allowed to be shared and customised for free. The availability of textbooks, courses and lesson plans is there for users such as students, teachers, universities and publishers, making learning experiences more flexible and adaptable.

Science

Creative Commons have expanded use of their Attribution licenses since 2004 into various fields, including scientific and technical research. By encouraging the scientific community to publish their work under various CC licenses, efforts focused on research are thus granted access to data and results otherwise inaccessible.

A number of institutions and online databases are utilizing the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licenses as a means to promote the sharing of data and results without jeopardizing ownership. These include the Public Library of Science (PLOS), BioMed Central, and Personal Genome Project to name a few. A full list of affiliated groups is listed here. Creative Commons play a vital role in the Open Access Movement, which aims to make scholarly articles and journals more widely available online. Integral to this movement is making this material freely available to everyone, which they call Open Data.

Creative Commons have furthered this co-operation within the field by implementing The Biological Materials Transfer Agreement Project which aims to cover the costs transferring biological materials between non-profit institutions, and transfer between non-profit and for profit institutions. This integrates a web-based system that stores a database of materials with a transaction system, allowing researchers to discover and order materials and ensure that scientists can find and obtain everything they need and begin work as soon as possible.

Creative Commons have also expressed an interest in becoming more involved in legislating the growing field of 3D printing as detailed in an article on the official Creative Commons website. The Creative Commons group seems to be backing the use of shared 3D printing schematics in a business setting, but as the technology is still in early development, no solid Creative Commons licensing has been put in place concerning the legality of personal object replication. The implications of a device that can not only print any number of physical objects using only an easily shareable online model file, but that also has the potential to replicate itself, as can be seen in the RepRap Project opens up an entire new debate on the use of Creative Commons in relation to production of physical objects, and whether or not individuals should have the freedom to download and create a product for free that they may otherwise have had to pay for.

Culture

Creative Commons within culture has evolved from the access of free information distributed through online sources. Wikipedia, Google and various online blog and profile sites have given the public and modern culture a way of sharing private and public information to one another. This however create issues with privacy and copyright laws, although these sites have maintained strength and growth through public contribution, these sites are protected but issues that infiltrate privacy, copyright and exploitation are usually policed upon by the sites interactive system.

Wikipedia migrated its licensing structure from the GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The world’s largest and most cited collaborative encyclopedia made this move via a community vote and for good reason. By changing to a CC BY-SA license, Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) allows content to legally flow in and out of the site with ease, enabling one of the great cultural resources of the digital revolution to legally interact with an endless array of similar cultural institutions. http://creativecommons.org/culture

Google has utilized CC licenses in a variety of instances throughout their digital services. Either by enabling CC-search capabilities through their main search engine, image search engine, and book search engine, or by allowing users to CC license their own content in Picasa, Google Knol, and documentation at Google Code. YouTube, which is Google-owned, has also used CC-licenses in their audio-swap program, allowing users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar-sounding CC-licensed tracks, as well as enabling CC-licensing for select institutions. http://creativecommons.org/culture

Culture today has developed around the freedom to express, contribute and learn from other contributors to the internet. Contributing allows cultures to interact and learn from one another, which was impossible during the television and radio age of the 20th century. The ability to learn from the internet has given creative commons and participation the ability to engage cultures with other cultures in a legal and interactive way.

Platforms

YouTube and Vimeo

YouTube is one of the organisations which provides a Creative Commons license for its users. This enables other users to add to their work or even use it commercially by using the YouTube Video Editor. The videos will be marked with a Creative Commons CC BY license. A video that is uploaded which is licensed with a CC BY license will source the origin content underneath the web player. Since 2011, Users have been able to license their videos under the 'Creative Commons Attribution license' as well as change the license of existing videos from a Standard Youtube license, to a CC license.

Not everyone is eligible to use this license. There are certain elements which can prevent users from being able to use it: Community Guideline strikes, copyright strikes and having more than one video blocked worldwide by Content ID.

Users will only be able to mark their videos with a CC license if all of the content belongs to them. Videos which are in the public domain are also eligible for the license. The public domain consists of videos which have lost their copyright protection over time and are now free for anyone to use.

Youtube also has a system for it's content creating users that allows channels that qualify for, and are accepted into, its partnership programme to join multichannel networks that allow users to post videos containing content that they would otherwise be reprimanded for with a copyright strike. These networks obtain this privilege via deals with the parties that would claim copyright on the content, usually by promising free publicity for the product or by taking part in a paid advertising brand deal.

As of the week of July 25th, 2012, over 4 million CC licensed video have been uploaded onto Youtube.

Like YouTube, Vimeo allows users to share, rework and reuse videos. There is a whole section on the website solely dedication to videos which have a CC license, and is split into the different types of licenses so users can pick what types of video they use to their preference.

Fan Fiction

There are a growing number of authors who use Creative Commons to legally permit derivative work (e.g. Mercedes Lackey [2]). This option is especially used amongst lesser-famous authors, as this can help with gaining exposure [3]. The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License is most suitable for this type of work [4] as it allows the adaption of original material. Attribution must be given and the work must be distributed under the same license as the original. It does not allow for commercial-use.

Some renowned authors, such as J. K. Rowling, allow this type of work under certain conditions (i.e. Rowling forbids pornographic or sexually explicit material [5]). However, many authors, even those who allow them, do not license fan fiction under Creative Commons license. Authors can therefore, under the Copyright Act of 1976, take actions to remove derivative work [6] [7].

The legal issues surrounding fan fiction is first and foremost dependent on the copyright owner. Creative Commons only facilitates the sharing of copyright work [8]. It is important to be aware which author explicitly forbids this type of work (a list of this can be found here and here).

Flickr

Flickr features the option to use one of the six CC default licenses as an alternative to full copyright for images [9]. Meaning that if a user has applied a CC license, these photos can be downloaded and potentially used by anyone as long as credit is attributed.

In 2007 Virgin Mobile Australia featured an image downloaded Flickr in an advertisement campaign. The advertisement depicted the teenager Alison Chang with the campaign slogans, "Dump your pen friend," printed over her picture. Wong, Alison’s youth counsellor, uploaded the image of the teenager under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license, allowing reuse of work with attributed credit [10] [11]. Virgin upheld the licenses restrictions by printing the URL page on the advertisment. Chang’s family and Wong filed a lawsuit against Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. CC Corporation was accused of not adequately educating the users about their license. The lawsuit added that the image was used without prior knowledge or consent of Alison [12] [13]. Both lawsuits were later dismissed on procedural grounds in 2009 [14].

Fan Art

DeviantArt, a website dedicated to art created by many different audiences, allows people to upload their work under any of the CC licenses. Even though fan art is building upon an original idea, it is allowed as long as people don't copy the creative element of it. DeviantArt's partnership with Creative Commons allows those artists who wish to work with authors to use their ideas and scenarios in their artwork and to help set guidelines for how this work should be used within that partnership. It also allows artists to define exactly how they do and do not wish their works to be used by other artists. Despite this, "DeviantArt allows as little sharing as possible and is the very opposite of the intent of Creative Commons" . People can commercially use other people's work or allow modifications, but if there is a specific artistic integrity to it, then this is not advised.

DevaintArt uses a number of buttons to allow users to choose how their work will be used. Users are able to "Use a creative commons license", which allows people to copy their work, as well as share it with friends. However, no changes can be made, and it may be used commercially. Users can also "Allow commercial use of work", which removes the 'non-commercial restriction' and allows the users work to be used along with any commercial endeavour. This is not advised for those who intend on selling their work in the future. User who upload work to the site can also choose an option called "Allow modification to your work". This option gives users the option to allow people to modify their work, but as previously stated, if there is specific artistic integrity, it is not advised. Along with this, users have the option to choose "Yes, as long as they share alike" which means that users can let those who share the same creative commons license modify their work.

Controversies

Due to the unusual methods of distribution utilised by many of the artists that operate under the Creative Commons system, there has been a large degree of backlash against it. This largely centres around the idea that people are obtaining this artistic content for free, which some groups have claimed encourages piracy, especially in the film and music industries. There are also political connections to the argument, with many critics claiming the system is anti-capitalist or even accusing it of having leanings towards communism. One blogger claimed that Creative Commons "destroys copyright protection and commerce, destroys value, and does not help artists to survive".

There is also some criticism revolving around the cost of running the Creative Commons system. Creative Commons itself is officially stated as a non-profit organisation, and so relies on public donations to keep afloat. 85% of the donations go towards what the website labels as "Program Services (includes: Culture, Education, International/Affiliates, Legal, Science, Technology)" whilst the rest goes towards fund-raising and paying administrative costs. Reportedly this means that Creative Commons needs to raise approximately $9 million a year in order to preserve the system. This has raised questions as to whether or not Creative Commons is a good option, considering how much it costs to run and also the fact that many content creators would prefer to use more well established and potentially even more restrictive systems. Even authors that use Creative Commons often tend to lean towards using variations of the system that allow them to maintain the most control over their work as possible. For example as of 2013, 80% of online scientific journal Cell Reports authors chose the CC-BY-NC-ND model for their usage of Creative Commons, the most controlling model available, allowing people to download and share their work, but not to alter it in any way or make any profit.

Rock and cabaret musician Amanda Palmer was a key figure involved in this controversy after her own usage of Creative Commons. Following the 2008 hiatus of her previous band The Dresden Dolls with drummer Brian Viglione, Palmer left her label Roadrunner Records after disputes regarding the treatment of fans. Currently Palmer releases all of her music that she is legally able to through Creative Commons in tandem with a "pay what you want" scheme causing uproar amongst those holding onto the more traditional methods of releasing art. Tensions only grew in 2012 when Palmer's second solo album "Theatre is Evil" was released after a successful run on crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The project quickly broke it's $100,000 goal and was given $1,192,793 by it's backers. The album was then released through the same Creative Commons system as the rest of her music, which led to further distaste from critics. Palmer has frequently commented on the controversy, remaining adamant that the system allows for a greater connection with her fanbase.

An example of the controversy surrounding Creative Commons in the world of monetised content creation was video game company Nintendo's decision to charge YouTube content creators for using footage of any of their games. This declaration meant that not only would Nintendo be entitled to percentage of the income amassed from a video that they claimed footage of their games was in, but also that Nintendo would delay that income to the uploader of the video for up to three months. This sparked a lot of concern from many prominent YouTube personalities as time delays on payment in a profession that relies on the expedient creation and monetisation of content could eventually lead to content creators choosing to stop making videos featuring Nintendo's games, leading to less online traffic from fans of a recognisable brand for YouTubers and less publicity for Nintendo.

Music

Communities

Creative Commons (CC) allows bands and artists to release music under a range of licenses, creating an abundance of music content which can be edited and shared by anyone, legally.

The most prominent and mainstream music site where CC content is available is Soundcloud. However most sites featuring this type of content are more niche and therefore less well known. For example BandCamp and ccMixter. All of these sites include CC licensed music, with many of them connecting the artists/bands with those in the music business.

Although SoundCloud downloads are free, in order to access certain tracks you have to 'like' the Facebook page of the artists. This is a good way for less well=known bands/artists to get a larger social media following.

The Free Music Archive is a collection that brings together music that is free to use and listen to by everyone, and though not all is protected under a CC license, the vast majority is.

FreeSound is a similar site, however it focusses on sound effects, mostly produced using musical instruments, with some using synthesised sounds. As well as having access to these sounds legally and for free, you can also upload your own creations once you have made an account on the site.

Most bands and artists who release their music under CC licenses are relatively unheard of. Some reasons for this being that they are generally new to the music industry, independent artists (or with independent record labels) or not yet commercially successful. Releasing music under these licenses can be a good way for these artist to break out into the mainstream and gain more success.

There are artists however that do make their repertoire free to acquire, such as the composer Kevin Macleod, founder of the website Incompetech on which he releases his arrangements for usage under a CC licence. Although the website does contain a donation system, Macleod makes all the pieces on the site completely free, although those who use his music must ensure both he and the website are credited.

Another prominent band, Nine Inch Nails have released Ghosts I-IV and The Still under CC licences. This was a new way of getting their music out there and as their frontman said during an interview "I can give you free music and in my opinion that may contribute to more people showing up to a show and when I say I give you free music it’s not really up to me to give you free music, it’s free anyway." By saying music is free anyway he is referring to how music can be downloaded for free by anyone and that's what many people are doing, but by using a CC licence and giving the music away for free they are expanding their fan base and therefore monetising NIN in other ways such as concert tickets and merchandise. When Ghosts I-IV was released it could be downloaded for free from Nine Inch Nails website however there were also limited addition CD's and records going right up to a $300 premium boxset which netted $750,000 profit proving that just cause something's free doesn't mean it can't make money and demonstrating the usefulness of a CC licence's flexibility to musicians.

Labels

CC licenses in a variety of different ways in terms of labels, from non-profit, to free downloading, donations and also profitable labels. Many new upcoming artists find distributing difficult for stock shares but allowing a label or free music website there music can be given to any who desire them, from students, filmmakers, musicians, and computer video gamers. For example MacLeod decided to release his music under Creative Commons licenses in order to maximize the number of people who can hear and find use of his music. His most popular license is the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) - as long as he receives credit, his music is free to use. This is true of Independent Music Labels too, Creative Licences are brought forward to protect copyright but is rather generous for students creating films, games and music today.

CASH Music (Providence, Rhode Island) is a non-profit label organisation which focuses on educating new musicians and currently enables digital purchases, secure downloads and social feeds. The webpage has third party resources such as MailChimp, Goggle Drive and PayPal. http://about.cashmusic.org This enables the webpage to be distributed throughout the independent market and free music for all and for others to contribute. Signing up to CASH Music is available here http://cashmusic.org

AlanLegs (discuss • contribs) 01:00, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Journalism

In 2009, Al Jazeera became the first big news organisation to use Creative Commons. At this time when the Israeli military in Gaza stopped international news channels from reporting within the strip, Al Jazeera took the advantage of being able to access it and made the footage available to be used and translated by other broadcasters. A few years later this advantage was used again when a similar situation was happening in Syria. In a letter to Creative Commons in 2009 Mohamed Nanabhay, Head on online at Al Jazeera, says "A large part of embracing free culture is accepting the fact that you are forsaking control in exchange for something greater – the empowerment of the creative community. This means that you never quite know where things will lead." Al Jazeera had only expected news organisations and documentary filmmakers to use to footage, however because of it's usability due to the CC licence stills started being taken from the videos to be used on wikipedia pages, and then it became used by a much wider group of people from educators to video game developers.

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund produces watchdog journalism by reporters who are from big organisations such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and all of their content is posted under a Creative Commons Attribution- No Derivative license.