Well, I’ve harped on about open standards and free software for years now, but I’ve realised that I don’t write very much about something just as important to me. I guess it’s because I’m so used to it, that I forget that some people won’t have even heard of it, never mind know its full worth.

First, an introduction. Boringly, it revolves around copyright.

For a long, long time (so long that it’s almost unimportant when it started), copyright has been automatically applied to anything that anyone writes, paints, draws, plays or comes up with creatively in any way - so long as it’s original, of course. So merely by writing this down, this posting is copyrighted. Fully, automatically, and without any need to have a copyright logo or anything stating who I am, or when it was written, or anything like that - it’s automatically copyrighted. All my photos - they’re all copyrighted too. Automatically. Fully.

That’s all very handy to stop people ripping me off - I don’t have to apply to any government department or fill in any forms to have the full weight of copyright law protecting everything that I do. I don’t even have to write © Andy Allan 2004 all over my photos. Everything that everyone else writes is automatically copyrighted too - but lots of people don’t realise that. Photos get copied profusely by people who don’t understand, and lots of people don’t realise that even without writing © Joe Bloggs on their pictures, I’m only allowed to look at them - even if they don’t give a flying one about copyright laws.

In other words, if you want to let people use your photos, put your cool short story on their own website, print out 10 copies of your play and hand them out to the cast, you have to make a concerted effort to waive those full, automatic copyright laws.

The Public Domain is a collection of creative works that don’t have copyright laws attached to them. They aren’t a collection like a library - it’s just a classification you put on something - “This play is in the Public Domain”, for instance. Before copyright laws came to be, everything was in the Public Domain. At first (think horse drawn carts, printing presses), you had to specifically apply for copyright, otherwise it would be in the Public Domain. After a while (think lawyers, publishing houses), everything was automatically copyrighted, but after a fixed amount of time (depending on whether it was a corporation or an individual that held the copyright) it would be transfered into the Public Domain. Nowadays (think music companies, movie companies), every few years they put another few years onto this “fixed” amount of time, and so, in America at least, not one single piece of copyrighted work has fallen into the Public Domain for the last few years, nor will again for many years to come. But that’s another story, for another time. The most important thing is that you can put your own creative works in the Public Domain, more or less by saying “I’m putting this into the Public Domain”.

Which is fair enough, but might be a little bit too far for your liking. After all, when something is in the Public Domain, anyone can do anything they like with it. They don’t need to tell you about what they’re doing, they don’t need to credit you, they can sell it, or change it, or use it to mock you, or whatever they like with no restrictions - that’s the power, and the downside, or the Public Domain. And you can’t take it back - there’s no loaning things to the Public Domain - you can’t change your mind later on.

So maybe there’s a need for a third (Third?) way of doing things, somewhere between full copyrights and Public Domain. By law, you can draw up licenses that allow selected people to use your copyrighted material, perhaps for money, perhaps for a set time, or with other restrictions. A group of (smart) people got together a few years ago, and came up with a collection of Open Source inspired licenses that have become the most popular such licenses in existence. They’re helping to change the creative world (for the better), and they call themselves the Creative Commons. And I’m going to talk about them some more.