"We've all been sad,
We've all been brokenhearted
We've all lost loved ones,
We've all forgotten how this started"
- Back Ted-n-Ted
cross-posted at my education blog, Drexel LibWebmaster
In 2001, with help from Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the Creative Commons Corporation was formed. Their mission was to create a set of licenses in the vein of GNU GPL that would allow creative works to be published and shared with a varying level of distribution restrictions. The thought behind this was to encourage sharing of creative products--films, images, songs, etc--to encourage and inspire others in artistic/creative pursuits, and to expand the creative product's viewing audience.
In 2006, the band Pearl Jam became one of the first highly commercial users of Creative Commons, licensing the video for their song "Life Wasted" under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license. This meant that anyone could view or share the video with others but in presenting it, could not pass it off as his/her own work and specifically had to give proper credit as specified by the band, could not make money off of the video, and could not make works deriving anything from the video. This may sound somewhat locked down, but bear in mind that otherwise, many music videos are technically illegal to share with others. This is when "Terms of Use" violations pop up on Youtube. Under the CC license that the band chose, the music video was openly and legally offered for download from several websites, including the ubiquitous BitTorrent.
Since 2006, many musicians are turning to Creative Commons to license not just videos, but also music in general. In 2008, the band Nine Inch Nails released two albums under the CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike license. A detailed description of this CC music movement can be found here.
Now, Creative Commons is being used for everything from music to film to the web. And not just any sites; massive media and data sources like Internet Archive, Flickr, DeviantArt, and Newgrounds are all under some variation of the Creative Commons license. Wordpress.com and Blogger-hosted blogs, the MITOpenCourseware course management system, and even the deservedly cult-hit web comic xkcd also utilize Creative Commons.
So what does this mean? As of right now, chances are, you have published something under a Creative Commons license. If you pull photos from a Flickr feed and post them on your Facebook wall, you are agreeing to the Creative Commons license that applies to those photos. If you quote someone's Wordpress blog post in your own blog, this applies.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Creative Commons is a part of the copyleft movement, and as stated above, is meant to aid in opening access to data, particularly online data and media. In the new age of social networking and publishing, a wealth of information in all formats is becoming available for consumption. Rather than resist the ease of information spread, many websites and even commercial artists or entities are jumping on the copyleft bandwagon. By doing this, they are allowing their information to be spread, thereby gaining notoriety for themselves.
They are also encouraging others to share the information they cull. Creative Commons use is growing and evolving. CCLearn has recently formed, a website dedicated to education about and the circulation of open education resources. And most recently, MSNBC reported that Uncensored Interview is releasing a large collection of their videos in Ogg Theora under the CC Attribution license. Under this new license, CC creative director Eric Steuer reported that Uncensored Interview hopes that they "are making a clear statement that allowing the sharing and creative reuse of material -- even for commercial purposes -- can enhance the value of that material for its creators. In promoting a 'some rights reserved' approach to distribution, Uncensored Interview is opening up a wide variety of possibilities..."
Those possibilities are available to all users of Creative Commons licenses now. As the license becomes more widely used and more popularly favored, more data will become available to everyone. For the future of open data in general, this can only be a boon. Sources/More Information:
