Essay NCT

Creative Commons is both a solution and yet another failure to deal with authorship and copyright on the internet. Discuss.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization which was started by Lawrence Lessing. Its main goal is to make it “easy for people to share and build upon the works of others consistent with the rules of copyright.” (About-Creative Commons).This increases the amount of creativity on the internet for public use, sharing and remixing legally. This piece of work, is to critically analyze and discuss the benefits and failures or drawbacks of Creative Commons when dealing with authorship and copyright on the internet.
Creative Commons allow people to submit their work, establish the terms and parameters they wish to have, and publish their work for others to see, share, use, or modify depending on the limitations of the license.(Introduction to social Interactivity online).This means that Creative Commons enables the idea of ‘some rights reserved’ rather than ‘all rights reserved’ which builds up online interactivity of internet users as people can share a variety of information, photos and music without going against the copyright laws. The types of licenses offered are summarized below.
Attribution –Creators allow other people to copy, distribute, display and perform their copyrighted work only if they acknowledge the creator.
Non-commercial –Creators allow others to copy distribute or perform their work only if they are not financially gaining from it.
No Derivative Works. Creators let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike-Allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
The above clearly shows that Creative Commons offer flexible rights licenses that help foster legal sharing not stealing thus, emphasises the idea that if one uses someone’s work he/ she has to give credit to the creator of the work.

Creative Commons do not require the explicit consent of the user, but rely on a legal mechanism. Instead of limiting the rights of the user, the license conditionally grants rights normally protected by copyright. If these rights are not acquired in another way, it is reasonable to assume that upon acting against the law but in accordance to the offered license, the license is accepted by the user. The user binds himself to the terms of the license by the sheer act of reproducing, modifying or distributing the work. If the user acts as if he has obtained permission, he is assumed to have accepted the offer and is required to honour conditions of the offer. In the Dutch case Curry v. Weekend (9 March 2006, LJN AV4204) the user of works published under a CC license was considered not have acquired rights other than those offered, which was about the only highlight of the case.( Bas Bloemsaat and Pieter Kleve,2009).

Creative Commons however, falls short in some areas relating to authorship and copyright. Some scholars argue that although a licensor of a work grants liberties to the world by applying a Creative Common license, people can never be sure about upstream authors or co-authors. If we are to assume that A created a certain art, then B shares the art on the internet using a Creative Common license, how will C know that B is not the creator of the art. It is often not so easy to tell the authenticity of the work if the licensor actually used information he would have derived from the actual owner. (International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 245).Creative Commons does not account for such discrepancies which might cause serious problems to person C under the copyright laws.

In Conclusion, I think Creative Commons should be credited for the internet community’s sharing and collaboration although it might have a few drawbacks.

Bibliography

Bas and Kleve, Pieter(2009) 'Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy', International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 23: 3, 237 — 249

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600860903262404

http://libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/login?

Billboard. New York: May 28, 2005. Vol. 117, Iss. 22; pg. 24, 2 pgs

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Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/about

Creative Review,London : June, 2006 pg. 36

Doctorow, Cory (2008) Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future

Introduction to Social Interactivity online, http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/01935/creativecommons.html

Wally Conhaim Information Today. Medford: Jul/Aug 2002. Vol. 19, Iss. 7; pg. 52, 2 pgs

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Locus Magazine, 2007
https://learning.secure.griffith.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_73970_1&frame=top
http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/01935/creativecommons.html