This is a short article I wrote for Dumbo Feather, Pass it On about Creative Commons:
Elliott Bledsoe
You’re online, you see some prose you like and you press ‘apple and c’. Copied. Simple as that. When the functionality of the internet lets content be copied as easily as that, it is hard to maintain the traditional “all rights reserved”/can’t touch this rhetoric of copyright. Sure, at law it’s a breach of copyright. But that doesn’t stop copying. There are a lot of internet users who don’t even realise that the copies they make are illegal. Copyright is dead.
Stop. Remix that. Copyright isn‚Äôt dead, it‚Äôs being (re)born. To the copyright traditionalists I say stop trying to stop copying, because you won’t. Start looking at regulating how people can copy. There is a mass of benefits to be gained by letting people have access to your content. The trick is knowing how to identify what bits to give away and what bits to keep. “But how?” you’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about copyright and I can’t afford a lawyer.” No problems, think Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is remixing copyright into a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists and which provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. For CC it’s about options. Want to be recognised as the author of your blog? Then require Attribution. Don’t want others making money from your animation? Easy. Put the work under a Non-Commercial term. Just want people to pass your novella around but don’t want them changing it? A No Derivatives licence will do that. And what if you want to see what people will do mashing up your work, but think they should share too? No problems, Share Alike compels them to let others remix anything they’ve made from your work.
But why stop there? Want to be acknowledged as the creator of your podcast and allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes? Put it under an Attribution-Non-Commercial licence and you’ve done just that. Using the CC licence generator on creativecommons.org, a mix and match of the permissions is as easy as answering a few questions.
At Creative Commons we don’t want to get rid of copyright, we want to remix it.
http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org.au
Elliott Bledsoe is a Project Officer with Creative Commons Australia. CC in Australia is part of the funded research under the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, www.cci.edu.au.
