History and international use
Lawrence Lessig andOrigins
The CCL allows inventors to keep the rights to their innovations while also allowing for some external use of the invention. The CCL emerged as a reaction to the decision in ''License porting
The original non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal system in mind; therefore, the wording may be incompatible with local legislation in otherChinese use of the Creative Commons license
Working with Creative Commons, the Chinese government adapted the Creative Commons License to the Chinese context, replacing the individual monetary compensation of U.S. copyright law with incentives to Chinese innovators to innovate as a social contribution. In China, the resources of society are thought to enable an individual's innovations; the continued betterment of society serves as its own reward. Chinese law heavily prioritizes the eventual contributions that an invention will have towards society's growth, resulting in initial laws placing limits on the length of patents and very stringent conditions regarding the use and qualifications of inventions."Info-communism"
An idea sometimes called "info-communism" found traction in the Western world after researchers at MIT grew frustrated over having aspects of their code withheld from the public. Modern copyright law roots itself in motivating innovation through rewarding innovators for socially valuable inventions. Western patent law assumes that (1) there is a right to use an invention for commerce and (2) it is up to the patentee's discretion to limit that right. The MIT researchers, led by Richard Stallman, argued for the more open proliferation of their software's use for two primary reasons: the moral obligation ofApplicable works
Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is governed by applicable copyright law. This allows Creative Commons licenses to be applied to all work falling under copyright, including: books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites.Software
While software is also governed by copyright law and CC licenses are applicable, the CC recommends against using it in software specifically due to backward-compatibility limitations with existing commonly used software licenses. Instead, developers may resort to use more software-friendlyPreconditions
The author, or the licensor in case the author did a contractual transfer of rights, need to have the exclusive rights on the work. If the work has already been published under a public license, it can be uploaded by any third party, once more on another platform, by using a compatible license, and making reference and attribution to the original license (e.g. by referring the URL of the original license).Consequences
The license is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and unrestricted in terms of territory and duration, so it is irrevocable, unless a new license is granted by the author after the work has been significantly modified. Any use of the work that is not covered by other copyright rules triggers the public license. Upon activation of the license, the licensee must adhere to all conditions of the license, otherwise the license agreement is illegitimate, and the licensee would commit a copyright infringement. The author, or the licensor as a proxy, has the legal rights to act upon any copyright infringement. The licensee has a limited period to correct any non-compliance.Types of licenses
Four rights
The CC licenses all grant "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes and without modification. In addition, different versions of license prescribe different rights, as shown in this table: The last two clauses are not free content licenses, according to definitions such asSix regularly used licenses
The six licenses in most frequent use are shown in the following table. Among them, those accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation – the public domain dedication and two attribution (BY and BY-SA) licenses – allow the sharing and remixing (creating derivative works), including for commercial use, so long as attribution is given.Zero / public domain
Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0, a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the public domain. CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible. Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license. Development of CC0 began in 2007 and it was released in 2009. A major target of the license was the scientific data community. In 2010, Creative Commons announced its Public Domain Mark, a tool for labeling works already in the public domain. Together, CC0 and the Public Domain Mark replace the Public Domain Dedication and Certification, which took a U.S.-centric approach and co-mingled distinct operations. In 2011, the Free Software Foundation added CC0 to its free software licenses. However, the Free Software Foundation currently does not recommend using CC0 to release software into the public domain because it lacks a patent grant. In February 2012, CC0 was submitted to Open Source Initiative (OSI) for their approval. However, controversy arose over its clause which excluded from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. This clause was added with scientific data in mind rather than software, but some members of the OSI believed it could weaken users' defenses against software patents. As a result, Creative Commons withdrew their submission, and the license is not currently approved by the OSI. From 2013 to 2017, the stock photography website Unsplash used the CC0 license, distributing several million free photos a month. Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, has contributed to the site. Unsplash moved from using the CC0 license to a custom license in June 2017 and to an explicitly nonfree license in January 2018. In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation approved the Creative Commons CC0 as conformant with theRetired licenses
Due to either disuse or criticism, a number of previously offered Creative Commons licenses have since been retired, and are no longer recommended for new works. The retired licenses include all licenses lacking the Attribution element other than CC0, as well as the following four licenses: * Developing Nations License: a license which only applies to developing countries deemed to be "non-high-income economies" by the World Bank. Full copyright restrictions apply to people in other countries. * Sampling: parts of the work can be used for any purpose other than advertising, but the whole work cannot be copied or modified * Sampling Plus: parts of the work can be copied and modified for any purpose other than advertising, and the entire work can be copied for noncommercial purposes * NonCommercial Sampling Plus: the whole work or parts of the work can be copied and modified for non-commercial purposesVersion 4.0
The latest version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, released on November 25, 2013, are generic licenses that are applicable to most jurisdictions and do not usually require ports. No new ports have been implemented in version 4.0 of the license. Version 4.0 discourages using ported versions and instead acts as a single global license.Rights and obligations
Attribution
Since 2004, all current licenses other than the CC0 variant require attribution of the original author, as signified by the BY component (as in the preposition "by"). The attribution must be given to "the best of ne'sability using the information available". Creative Commons suggests the mnemonic "TASL": ''title'' -- ''author -- source'' eb link-- C''licence''.Non-commercial licenses
The "non-commercial" option included in some Creative Commons licenses is controversial in definition, as it is sometimes unclear what can be considered a non-commercial setting, and application, since its restrictions differ from the principles of open content promoted by other permissive licenses. In 2014 Wikimedia Deutschland published a guide to using Creative Commons licenses as wiki pages for translations and as PDF.Adaptability
Rights in an adaptation can be expressed by a CC license that is compatible with the status or licensing of the original work or works on which the adaptation is based.Legal aspects
The legal implications of large numbers of works having Creative Commons licensing are difficult to predict, and there is speculation that media creators often lack insight to be able to choose the license which best meets their intent in applying it. Some works licensed using Creative Commons licenses have been involved in several court cases. Creative Commons itself was not a party to any of these cases; they only involved licensors or licensees of Creative Commons licenses. When the cases went as far as decisions by judges (that is, they were not dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or were not settled privately out of court), they have all validated the legal robustness of Creative Commons public licenses.Dutch tabloid
In early 2006, podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid who published photos from Curry's Flickr page without Curry's permission. The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they did not repeat the offense. Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, main creator of the Dutch CC license and director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, commented, "The Dutch Court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and binds users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license."Virgin Mobile
In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched an advertising campaign promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to Flickr using a Creative Commons-BY (Attribution) license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to the photographer's Flickr page on each of their ads. However, one picture, depicting 15-year-old Alison Chang at a fund-raising carwash for her church, caused some controversy when she sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison's church youth counselor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. In 2008, the case (concerningSGAE vs Fernández
In the fall of 2006, the''GateHouse Media, Inc. v. That's Great News, LLC''
On June 30, 2010, GateHouse Media filed a lawsuit against''Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC''
The plaintiff was photographer Art Drauglis, who uploaded several pictures to the photo-sharing website Flickr using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-SA), including one entitled "Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD.". The defendant was Kappa Map Group, a map-making company, which downloaded the image and used it in a compilation entitled "Montgomery Co. Maryland Street Atlas". Though there was nothing on the cover that indicated the origin of the picture, the text "''Photo: Swain's Lock, Montgomery Co., MD Photographer: Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis, Creative Commoms'' '', CC-BY-SA-2.0''" appeared at the bottom of the back cover. The validity of the CC BY-SA 2.0 as a license was not in dispute. The CC BY-SA 2.0 requires that the licensee to use nothing less restrictive than the CC BY-SA 2.0 terms. The atlas was sold commercially and not for free reuse by others. The dispute was whether Drauglis' license terms that would apply to "derivative works" applied to the entire atlas. Drauglis sued the defendants in June 2014 for copyright infringement and license breach, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, fees, and costs. Drauglis asserted, among other things, that Kappa Map Group "exceeded the scope of the License because defendant did not publish the Atlas under a license with the same or similar terms as those under which the Photograph was originally licensed." The judge dismissed the case on that count, ruling that the atlas was not aVerband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet (VGSE)
In July 2016, German computer magazine LinuxUser reported that a German blogger Christoph Langner used two licensed photographs from Berlin photographer Dennis Skley on his private blog Linuxundich. Langner duly mentioned the author and the license and added a link to the original. Langner was later contacted by the ''Verband zum Schutz geistigen Eigentums im Internet'' (VGSE) (Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property in the Internet) with a demand for €2300 for failing to provide the full name of the work, the full name of the author, the license text, and a source link, as is required by the fine print in the license. Of this sum, €40 goes to the photographer, and the remainder is retained by VGSE. See also: The Higher Regional Court of Köln dismissed the claim in May 2019.Works with a Creative Commons license
Creative Commons maintains a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines (see Creative Commons-licensed content directories).Unicode symbols
After being proposed by Creative Commons in 2017, Creative Commons license symbols were added to Unicode with version 13.0 in 2020. The circle with an equal sign (meaning ''no derivatives'') is present in older versions of Unicode, unlike all the other symbols. These symbols can be used in succession to indicate a particular Creative Commons license, for example, ''CC-BY-SA'' (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike) can be expressed with Unicode symbolsCIRCLED CC
, CIRCLED HUMAN FIGURE
and CIRCLED ANTICLOCKWISE ARROW
placed next to each other: 🅭🅯🄎
Case law database
In December2020, the Creative Commons organization launched an online database covering licensing case law and legal scholarship.See also
* Free-culture movement * Free music * Free software *Notes
References
External links
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