Quest 0.4 - Creative Commons (CC) Licenses

"Carefully review the Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/). Write a post describing the different licenses."

The Creative Commons website identifies six main license types. For each license listed is provided a brief summary, a link to a "human-readable" description of the specific conditions of the license, and a link to the full-blown license text, which one might suppose could be described as "lawyer-readable".

After reading the full text of a couple of the licenses, I began to lose my will to live. I guess there's a reason I'm looking to become an instructional technologist instead of a doctor of jurisprudence. However, here is my best attempt to summarize the things I learned.

Copyright Law
According to some in-class lecture notes, the "Open Educational Resources Handbook for Educators 1.0" (Gurell), and the Section 3 of the CC Licenses copyright law (at least in the United States) requires that in relation to a Work, anyone who is not the Original Author of the Work must receive permission from the Original Author before:

(Gurell, p. 191)

• creating derivative works from the original work


• distributing originals or copies of the work


• publicly displaying or performing the work

So, per United States (and many other countries') copyright law, anyone wanting to participate in one of the three activities described above would have to obtain permission from the Original Author to do so.

But what if I, the Original Author of all sorts of things, want to freely share those things with others on the web? Isn't it good enough to just put all my junk on my website and let people download it, do whatever they may with it? As I understand it, it turns out that unless the Original Author makes explicitly clear, in writing, that he or she desires to grant certain rights to others with regard to content on that website, web visitors would still find themselves in violation of the law if they attempted to redistribute, modify, or publicly display or perform any of the content from that website. (Of course this would not lead to prosecution unless so instigated by the Original Author.)

In other words, someone's good intentions on a personal website ("Here's some of my code, do whatever you want with it!") leave the people who want to "do whatever" with those materials on very shaky legal ground. So we need to make it a little more concrete than that. We need to use some more specific terminology and tie it into current copyright law. But who has the knowledge of copyright law that would be necessary to make their good intentions legally binding? And certainly not everyone has the resources to hire a lawyer to do this for them.

Enter Creative Commons.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licenses provide all the legalese (and I do mean all of it) that allow ordinary people like you and me to free up their content and grant rights for redistribution, modification, and performance to everyone else in the world. Or, using words from the CC front page, "you can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"

So Creative Commons provides the legal expertise necessary to help make our good intentions legally binding. (Author's note: in a comment below, David Wiley rightly pointed out that Creative Commons does not in any way, shape, or form even pretend to offer legal counsel to anyone! Quoting Wiley, "They simply produce licenses. You may choose to use them or not, but you’re on your own either way.")

Because they understand that not everyone wants to give away all rights to their original works, CC created several different versions of the license. Each license encompasses one or more of the following restrictions:

(take from the CC website)

1. Attribution (By) - "You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request."


2. Share Alike (SA) - "You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work."


3. Non-commercial (NC) - "You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only."


4. No derivative works (ND) - "You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it."

Thus, through different combinations of the restrictions listed above, we get the following CC licenses, listed in order from least restrictive to most restrictive:

1. (Attribution) - This license grants users the big three rights: redistribute, modify, and publicly display/perform your work, provided that they credit you for your original contribution in the way that you desire. This license is, of course, the least restrictive of the CC licenses. I can see many cases where a truly altruistic person, wanting only to give something to the world, would use a license like this. Using this license will earn you a lot of friends.


2. 
   
   (Attribution-Share Alike) - This license is also quite liberal, allowing users all the rights mentioned in the licenses above. There is still the attribution restriction (give credit where it is due) and one additional restriction: works derived from your original work must be licensed under this exact same license. The implications here are that someone could make derivative works and market them commercially, for example, but that person would be obligated to make their derivative works available to everyone under the same terms of this same license. As the Original Author, I think that would be great because then anyone who made any improvements on my content would have to share them with me as well.


3. 
   
   (Attribution-No Derivatives) - This license is interesting to me. It limits only the user's right to make derivative works from your work. This, however, means that the user may still use your work for commercial purposes, provided that they give you credit for your original work. So users may copy and redistribute and even sell your work, but they must give you credit. I'm not sure exactly when I would want to use this license, unless I was a Hollywood film producer wanting to throw a wrench into the works for ClearPlay. No, not even then. I'll bet this one isn't used very often.


4. 
   
   (Attribution-Non-commercial) - Ah. So, users here can still make derivative works and freely distribute my work, but they must give me credit for the work, and they cannot use my work for commercial purposes. Interestingly, because of the lack of the SA (Share Alike) restriction, people farther down the line could make use these derivative works for commercial purposes. I'm guessing this one probably isn't used very often either.


5. 
   
   (Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike) - I think I remember someone saying this is by far the most used CC license, which is ironic, because it also happens to be one of the most restrictive. This license allows distribution, copying, and modification, provided credit is given to the original author and none of these activities are undertaken for the purpose of commercial gain. Any derivative works must be licensed under this same license.


6. 
   
   (Attribution - Non-commercial - No Derivatives) - By far the most restrictive license, this one is referred to on the CC website as the "free advertising" license. This license allows people to distribute your work freely, but not for commercial purposes. They may not make derivative works from your work in any way. This license, obviously, does not really support the idea of openness.