User:Miranche/cc

An essay about Creative Commons I've written in February 2008 for the Local to Global Justice Teach-in website.

You have probably noticed the strange CC icon on the bottom of the page – take a second to look. What is that? Is it (gasp!) legalese?!

Yes, it is legalese. “CC” stands for Creative Commons, and it means that anyone can use the text from this website and post it anywhere else, as long as they give us credit. This way, if anyone wants to spread the word about Local to Global, or perhaps if they like something we wrote, they can do it without the hassle of asking permission; the CC sign makes this official. Creative Commons is a set of licenses introduced in 2001 in order to make creative collaboration over the Internet easier. The licenses are based on copyright law, and cover the ground between full copyright and public domain. They can apply almost to any content – artwork, music, educational materials, and are used quite widely. For example, MIT offers much of its course materials online under a CC license. Gilberto Gil, a singer, guitarist and songwriter, currently the Minister of Culture of Brazil, has endorsed Creative Commons and published several of his songs under a CC license.

Behind any good idea there is a story, and this starts with the invention of the printing press. Once upon a time, much of what people created was free to copy or change for anyone who could manage it. You could take, for example, a poem, a picture, or a quote, include it in your own work, change parts you did not like, or maul it beyond recognition, and nobody really cared – perhaps you could make some enemies this way, but in most cases no protection was formalized. As printing and literacy became more widespread, however, someone got the idea that coding some restrictions into law would be a good thing. Giving authors legal power over their creations, in theory, helps them live from their work, and copyright law was invented.

Fast forward to today, and the picture is much different. As I am writing these lines, I am producing property – and I mean it literally. By default, anything you or I may write, draw or compose – shopping lists, doodles, bathroom graffiti and nonsense melodies we sing in the shower – is property protected by copyright law, and if someone wants to copy, distribute or modify it, she has to ask for permission. If this sounds like it could be a drag, it is. It creates a breeding ground for predatory lawyers, looking to charge royalty fees for everything that walks or moves. Then, also, very often it does not really help creativity any more. The global electronic network presents a great opportunity for group collaboration on any project, and such collaboration would not be able to get off the ground if everyone in the group had to ask permission to use another’s work. There are alternatives, but they are clumsy – giving up ownership to the public domain, or introducing group property through (shudder!) incorporating.

The first ones who decided something was amiss and went to do something about it were the computer geeks. In the 1980s, MIT software developer and über-nerd Richard Stallman started the software freedom movement, fighting for the rights to access, modify and distribute computer programs. These freedoms were taken for granted in the earliest days of hacking enthusiasts, but were getting rapidly curtailed at the time. Stallman and some of his colleagues considered this unethical and antisocial, and to counter it, started working on an operating system called GNU (GNU’s Not Unix). They also produced a license that applies to it, called the GNU General Public License (GPL). Apart from granting free access to source code, the GPL also introduced something now known as “copyleft”: anyone who uses GPL‑licensed code in their work must use the same or compatible license, and share their work alike. Because of this, critics call the GPL license a General Public Virus, as it spreads to new work derived from it.

Virus or not, the idea works well for software. More widely described as “open source”, it gave us a free, stable, and sometimes maintenance-heavy operating system, GNU/Linux. The development culture associated with it was popularized in the book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond. He claimed that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” – if enough people have access to how a computer program works, it is much easier to find and correct errors. If this idea works for computer programs, why not for something else, less arcane – like, an online encyclopaedia? Wikipedia was launched in 2001, and for all its troubles, it has proved a success. At the time it was started, the best license to allow for large-scale online collaboration on text was the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Although a good license, it was not the best fit, as it applies only to text, and was primarily intended for software documentation.

At the same time, a group headed by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig introduced a set of licenses based on copyright law to be used exactly for such purposes – Creative Commons. The centerpiece of CC are the six core licenses that let authors choose which rights they wanted to keep and which to free. These licenses have been exported to 43 national jurisdictions. Also, specialized divisions of CC have focused on sharing music samples, educational resources, and research data. In the spirit of turning © walls into CC bridges, we join them.