Monday 26th July 2004
Intro to Creative Commons
Following on from the last post, what is this Creative Commons malarky? At its heart, CC is a collection of well-presented licenses. These allow the copyright owners to decide whether to allow derivatives of the creative work, whether to let people use it commercially, and whether to require attribution when things get reused. (Well, nobody ever used the no-attribution licenses, so they were removed recently).
If you want to find out more about the licenses, you can have a look at the CC cartoons and animations, or even just fiddle with the license chooser.
The main thing that has made Creative Commons work where other attempts have quite made it are the “Human Readable” pages that copyright holders can link to – like this one. All legal documents are pretty turgid (lawyers have a vested interest in making sure nobody else can understand them), so these potted summary pages have inspired lots of people to use them. And I reckon that these, more than anything else, have made the whole thing work. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Anyway, too much focus on the licenses, and I’ll miss out on talking about the best bits – what people have been using the licenses for. I’ve been meaning to talk about these things for a while, but felt that I needed a bit of introduction to the topic first. And a new catagory, that I’m calling, for want of a better phrase, “Open Culture”. Until tomorrow (or maybe the next day), then…