Creative Commons 101

The Creative Commons Licence: "some rights reserved"

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" is the norm. At the other end is anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

The Creative Commons project is working to revive reasonableness. The freely-available suite of cc licences offers creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works and encourage pre-defined uses by others. The goal is to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules. Using the cc licence a creator can declare that there are "some rights reserved." This allows other creators open access to the work's source code under the publicized terms and conditions.

The term open-source is best understood as a community-centric framework, which advocates sharing of knowledge and the collaborative development of information-based products of all mediums and genres. This is accomplished by utilizing the Internet's revolutionary data communication capabilities and omnipresence. Sharing sets the stage for subsequent innovation. The cc licence helps to make sharing both possible and predictable. Without continued innovation, culture risks becoming dangerously stagnant.

Creative Commons vs. FLOSS

The Creative Commons Licence takes its inspiration in part from Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). The term FLOSS was popularized in a June 2001 letter to the European Commission. FLOSS was created by combining the competing terms free and open-source software, as advocated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI), respectively. Libre is used to connote that "free as in freedom" is the intended understanding, rather than "free of charge", ie. gratis.

The term FLOSS refers to software released under a copyright licence that conforms to the principles enumerated in the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) Open Source Definition or the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) Four Freedoms. Note that OSI and FSF definitions are complementary and non-exclusionary – though elucidated in different language, they are the same. In a nutshell, to be officially considered open source, the licence that the work is offered under must allow for, among other things:

royalty-free redistribution (including source code); and
modifications and derived works.

A licence which meets these requirements is referred to as copyleft. Contrary to popular belief copyleft and open-source are not synonymous. Copyleft is one type of open-source licence, the other being non-copyleft. In both cases, the original work (and, applicable, its source code) is made freely-available to the public. Source code refers to the form of a work in which it may be modified.

Copyleft is used to indicate reciprocal licensing; that is, where a work's copyright licence requires that users of the work continue to make it (and any derivatives in which it forms whole or part) freely-available to others under the terms of the parent licence. Through these conditions, the licence implicitly authorizes derivative works. This is to ensure the freedom from derivative works being offered under more restrictive licences. In the Creative Commons jargon this is referred to as "ShareAlike". Copyright law itself is relied upon to provide a mechanism for insuring compliance by subjecting violators to legal sanctions.

Alternatively, non-copyleft licences are non-reciprocal and do not carry such a requirement. This is the freedom to offer a derivative work under any licence. For example, non-copyleft licenced works can be subsequently offered under proprietary licences. This is how non-copylefted works, such as the BSD TCP/IP network stack, have found themselves incorporated into proprietary product offerings. However, non-copyleft is an important option for creators who wish to make their works freely-available but without any restrictions on the licensing of derivative works.

See the following diagram for a simple illustration of the spectrum of software licences.

Spectrum of Licences

Figure: Spectrum of Licences

The popular GNU General Public Licence (GPL) was drafted to help people retain their copyright while licensing the applicable work as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. The GPL and licences like it are copyleft licences in that they require derivatives to carry the parent (or analogous) licence. This mechanism for encouraging creators to adopt copyleft licences has been highly successful in producing a critical mass of high quality software products.

Unlike the GPL, the cc licence is not designed for software, but, rather, for other kinds of creative works: websites, texts, courseware (these are all considered literature), music, film, photography, etc. Again, choosing to use an open-source licence for your creation allows others to copy, modify and redistribute it. Electing to use a copyleft licence ensures that your work remains freely-available by adding the caveat that derivative works must carry the parent licence. This helps to encourage peer-production.

However, there are only two of the Creative Commons licences which would, in fact, qualify as open-source if they were applied to software; namely, Attribution (non-copyleft in its lack of restrictions) and Attribution-ShareAlike (copyleft). The other four permutations which contain the requirement of no derivatives and/or no commercial use would not qualify under the Open Source Definition nor the FSF's Four Freedoms. See the six Creative Commons licences and Spectrum of Licences (above).

It is interesting to note that the Creative Commons licences are broader in scope than FLOSS licences in that they allow for peer-distribution without the accompany requirement of authorizing peer-production, ie. derivative works, mandated by open-source licences. As such, when used in connection to the Creative Commons licences, the term open-source more correctly refers to a methodology used to encourage innovation through the sharing of resources.

Why use a Creative Commons Licence?

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

- Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Some people may be attracted to a cc licence by the notion of others building upon their work, or by the prospect of contributing to an intellectual commons. As the Creative Commons community grows, licensors will play an important role in providing the foundational resources for commons-based peer production.

Others might license their creations purely out of self-interest. A scholar might want her writings to be copied and shared so that her ideas spread around the world. An upstart designer may want to encourage the unfettered dissemination of his sketches to help build a reputation. An established commercial musician might post samples to whet the public's appetite for his other, pay-for-play songs. A political activist may want her message to reach the widest possible audience through unlimited copying. The cc licence allows creators to publicize their works without relinquishing undue control of their copyright. Read more examples on the Creative Commons website.

In fact, the page you are reading now makes use of the fact that the Creative Commons Website is licensed under Creative Commons Licence Attribution 2.0, ie. the Creative Commons site allows anyone to use its content as long as attribution is made to Creative Commons. In fact, this web content is itself a derivative work based on text found on the Creative Common's site – the required attribution may be found at the bottom of this page.

Copyright Notice

The composition on this page is a derivative work based on text found on the Creative Commons website.

Choosing a License

Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any interested party, and only under certain conditions.

The cc licences allows creators to mix and match various allowable uses to generate a rights-specific licence tailored to their personal preferences. The chosen cc licence is then attached to a work by technological means particular to the medium of the work. For example, an HTML page can use a hyperlink to attach the licence; an MP3 file can use an ID3 frame. Again, each licence has the effect of enabling the creator to publicize that there are "some rights reserved" with respect to the digital work. The cc licence applies worldwide, lasts for the duration of the work's copyright, and is non-revocable.

With the cc-ca licence, there are six possible licences each of which reserves a different subset of copyright(s). The appropriate licence is generated on a creator's response to the following two questions:

Do you want to restrict commercial uses of your work, i.e. permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only for non-commercial purposes?
Do you want to allow modifications of your work?
1. Yes, i.e. permit others to create derivative works.
2. Yes, as long as others share alike, i.e. permit others to distribute derivative works only under a licence identical to the licence that governs your work.
3. No, i.e. permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.

*Please note that the Canadian creator moral right of attribution is retained while the right of integrity is expressely waived in all versions of the cc-ca licence 2.4. To learn more about the moral rights automatically granted to Canadian creators, we encourage you to read our Moral Rights FAQ.*

Once a creator has selected the appropriate cc-ca licence variant for their digital work, the licence generator will output three different formats of the licence, each with its own specialized function:

Commons Deed

A simple, plain-language summary of the licence, including the relevant cc icons for easy reference.

Legal Code

The legal draft component; legalese fine print that ensures that the licence meets the necessary requirements to be valid under the applicable national laws and regulations.

Digital Code

A machine-readable translation of the licence that should be added to your digital work. The code helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use.

The digital code also includes a hyperlink that will link your work with the desired Commons Deed. The Commons Deed and Legal Code are posted online via the Canadian iCommons website. The hyperlink looks like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence