The aim of the Creative Commons organisation is not to provide licences, but to enable authors of creative works to share their content online.
Licenses are a tool to achieve this goal regarding the current copyright framework.
Lawrence Lessig was a law professor during the period he founded the organisation in 2001. His problem stems from the application of old copyright laws on emerging new digital technologies. Through the protection of the author, it was/is (legally) restricting every use and sharing of creative work.
Despite this ability of digital technologies to share resources, by default law wouldn't allow it, creating incompatibilities between legal theory and new technological realities. The law was more conceived in the context of the printing press in the Age of Enlightenment than the Internet (in the Anthropocene).
« We at Creative Commons thought this was a kind of legal insanity — an insanity, that is, created by the law. »
For a lot of people, copyright infringement is an unconscious daily routine, « but there are some, and especially some important institutions like schools, universities, governments, and corporations that rightly hesitate in the face of that uncertainty.
And thus the motivation for CC licenses: A simple way for authors and artists to express the freedoms they want their creativity to carry.
Creators who want to say “All Rights Reserved” need not apply. But creators who want just “Some Rights Reserved” could use our licenses to express that idea simply. »
Inspired by the free software and open source movement, he advocates for a « free culture » with the intent to give this ability to share and reuse for both "commercial and non commercial culture", the latter being the most widespread practice in human society.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, this change came at a time when free and open source software was proliferating (with the Internet), leading to philosophical questions about the application of copyleft strategies outside software, with also the emergence of David Waley's 1998 initiative around the term open content when he witnessed open source (he joins Creative Commons at its start).
Creative Commons initiative is somehow the beginning of the formalisation for the sharing of creative works and non-software resources through digital technologies.
Stallman, as the founder of the Free Software Foundation, « can't support it at all now [2005] » because some licenses were not compliant with the definition of free software by FSF, leading to the definition of Free Cultural Works to fit the FSF definition.
Are creative commons licences an excellent way of sharing online resources or a necessary pain regarding default copyright laws?
Sources
- Book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28802969_Free_Culture
- CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on How it All Began : https://creativecommons.org/2005/10/12/ccinreviewlawrencelessigonhowitallbegan/
- Philosophies of Free Software and Intellectual Property: http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/free-software-philosophy.html
- OpenContent is officially closed. And that's just fine. : https://web.archive.org/web/20030802222546/http://opencontent.org/
- Stallman claim of non support to creative commons: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html
- Definition of Free Culture Works: https://freedomdefined.org/Definition
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