First, it was the music industry that witnessed an incredible amount of illegal usage of traditionally copyrighted materials. Kazaa and similar file-sharing networks have made sure that millions of mp3 music files have been exchanged “uncommercially” on the internet. That has supposedly led to the demise of the previously very lucrative music industry. But all efforts at copyrighting materials seem to have failed. Digital Rights Management tools, being sold to the incumbents of the industry by clever salesmen who saw an opportunity to sell a fix to a problem that cannot be so easily fixed, have largely failed, or have forced major labels like EMI, and major distributors like Amazon, to offer music without DRM protection.

In the next step, with YouTube hosting thousands of traditionally copyrighted materials, uploaded neither by the creators of the content, nor by those the creators have sold the rights to, the whole problem now is also threatening TV and movie contents. With parent company Google demonstratively putting aside a dedicated amount of more than 200 million dollars for possible legal fees arising from the YouTube practices, the debate about what will be the future of copyright has reached a new level of debate and discussion.

In an age where sharing ideas, music and videos is becoming more important than owning, selling and profiting directly from one’s creative efforts, Intellectual Property Rights might be in for a re-definition. Sorting all this out might take another decade, but for those wo do not want to wait so long, Creative Commons provides an alternative copyright license that complements the preexisting. It tries to provide a way for artists and the public to be able to legally enjoy and use the work of another artist. CC is a compromise between copyright laws, that provide full protection of the intellectual product, and the public domain that provides no protection at all.
The protection provided under the Creative Commons license is defined by the creator himself. To be more specific, there are four conditions applicable to a creative commons license.
The first is the ATTRIBITION REQUIREMENT: this means anyone can distribute someone’s work as long as they give credit to the creator.
The second one is the NO DERIVATIVE WORKS permission which allows to copy and redistribute a work without any alterations or transformations.
The third and most important condition is the NONCOMMERCIAL use. This prohibits anyone from exploiting the work commercially. This condition seems simple, but it is not. Exactly what is meant by commercial use is yet to be defined.  A draft on what constitutes a permitted noncommercial use under the CC licenses has been posted on Wiki.creativecommons.org, in order for a widely accepted definition to be found.
The last one is the SHARE ALIKE option. This means that when someone uses the work to create something new, then the new creator has to make the work available on the same terms. The SHARE ALIKE might cause problems if the final product is a combination of works that have different creative commons licenses.

The real revolutionary change Creative Commons brings is that no intermediary is necessary anymore. CC is simple enough for the creator to understand without contacting lawyers and define how the work can be exploited by others. It is completely adjusted to today’s needs as it offers a digital code that can be recognized by any computer so that any user can be informed about what they can do with another’s work and what they cannot. Upon clicking on the Creative Commons icon different texts appear, one that is user friendly and one written in a legal language.

This solves one of the biggest disadvantages that copyright holds. Having a unified digital archive makes it easy to attribute the work to the artist as he or she wishes. Traditional copyright is different for each country and many times the work’s origin is hard to track back. Copyright still exists but creative commons allows some use of the work under specific conditions. Therefore, no one is allowed to copy the whole work and exploit it under copyright laws, he or she can use just a part of it as specified in the creative commons license in order to create something new. And if someone does not wish to exert any rights at all, it is possible to use the Public Domain Dedication so that other users know that they are free to use the work as they please for whatever purpose.

Apart from the obvious practicality of Creative Commons, the cultural impact cannot be ignored. The basis for the license is the idea of a free and shared culture, allowing the circulation of cultural goods under conditions that do not prohibit creativity while, at the same time, safeguarding intellectual property rights of the original creator.

So Creative Commons can be a major model for the future of intellectual property for a world where users become producers and where sharing ideas and knowledge will be more importnat that merely owning and monetizing them…and it looks like it is here to stay.

J. Makrantonaki

Published: May 26, 2007