CREATIVE COMMONS
We invariably come across copyright issues during our normal working day – patrons making copies from books, copying from websites and printing out database articles.Copyright protects "original works of authorship", such as literary works, musical works, dramatic works, graphic works, audiovisual works and architectural works. It is very restrictive in that you first have to get the permission of the author/creator before you can use, reproduce, and rework the original work. In some cases this can be quite a mission, especially when there are several persons and corporations involved. The online medium has brought a new way of doing things and created many difficulties in terms of copyright.
Creative Commons licenses present another legal way in which authors/creators of original works state how they want to share their work and which rights they retain.
What is the Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation who provide free legal tools for anyone to grant copyright permissions to their creative work in a standardised way. There are six main licenses based on a combination of the four main conditions creators wish to apply to their work. These licenses grant the public permission beforehand in terms of use, distribution, reuse/remix and attribution. As the Creative Commons organisation states on their website:
“Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright and the public domain. From all rights reserved to no rights reserved.” (Creative Commons.org - What is CC)
Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but work alongside it to make the process of legally sharing much simpler and clearer.
More information on the Creative Commons:
- YouTube video: A shared culture (This can take up to 5 mins to download on work computers - right click and open in new window, let it download while you get on with something else then come back to it).
- Explore the NZ Creative Commons website - all the basic information on Creative Commons.
If the Comments section below is not open .... click on the link to find participants' comments which could be helpful for this topic.
...............................................................................................................................
*** EXERCISES ****** FURTHER READING - optional ***
...............................................................................................................................
?? Learned anything interesting that we haven't covered here ?? - Please share via this comment section
ReplyDeleteRichard Stallman spoke at LIANZA Conference 2009. He is a champion for open-source and creative commons and made the interesting comment that copyright never existed until the invention of the printing press...
ReplyDelete