Academic Digital Rights: A Walk on the Creative Commons

By Glenn Otis Brown

In the face of ever longer and stronger copyright laws, Creative Commons has launched a suite of licenses�its first project of many�to help recreate a healthy public domain.

In principle, copyright is a spectrum. It grants authors an array of discrete, fine-grained powers: the rights to copy, redistribute, commercially exploit, or build upon an authored work, among others. Each right can be exercised individually and enforced more or less than any other, depending on the author's preferences.

In practice, however, copyright tends toward monochrome: It applies automatically and fully to all works the moment they're made, regardless of the author's aims. To deviate from this "all rights reserved" default usually requires the help of skilled (and often expensive) lawyers.

For many large media companies�for and by whom copyright law is largely written�this automatic, full-bore copyright default might make sense. But for the rest of us, who author the great bulk of our society's culture, it can be a clumsy, even counterintuitive tool. In academia, in particular, the timeless ethos of collaboration has been electrified by the Internet in recent years, and scholarly authors have long recognized that enforcing every last one of their rights to the hilt may in fact impede their main aim: the spread of information.

Preferring to Share
Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation founded on this notion�that some people prefer to share their works on more generous terms than standard copyright provides. Our goal is to offer such authors an easy and clear way to announce these preferences. And, in time, to cultivate a large body of material, whether owned or public domain, that is free for certain uses�and clearly marked as such, so that the world knows its status up front. The idea is to expand access to high-quality content online while reducing the legal friction and doubt of living with copyright every day.

Our first project toward this end is our suite of Creative Commons licenses, launched in December 2002. Each license allows an author to retain his or her copyright while allowing certain uses of his or her work�on certain conditions�to declare "some rights reserved." The licenses, which are available at no charge, allow the world to copy or redistribute covered works provided certain terms of the author's choosing are met. Authors can come to our site and, from an intuitive menu, choose the combination of conditions that best reflects their preferences (see "Some Rights Reserved").

The licensing project is, in many respects, modest in aim. Creative Commons does not seek to change the current laws or reform the copyright system, and in no sense are the licenses a panacea for the complex problems facing authors and publishers in the online world. Rather, we simply want to provide authors tools that will help them live a little better under that system as it stands today. Our approach is strictly voluntary and depends to a great degree on the participation of our community of users. And our fundamental mission is simply to help crystallize the norms for sharing already thriving in many online communities.