Creative Commons Licensing Toolset For Digital Media

The Creative Commons License
That's exactly the problem that the folks at the Creative Commons set out to solve. Assembling a team of those very same high-priced copyright lawyers from top law firms and law schools, they've created a set of simple licensing options to make the full range of potential rights and permissions available to the creative community at large.

Each CC license has two sorts of provisions – those built in to all CC licenses and those options you select when you create your license. In brief, what you declare with any CC license is that you retain copyright to your work, that you require anyone who distributes or displays your work to leave your license terms attached and unaltered, and that no one can use technological means to restrict others' lawful access to the work. You also give permission to display, copy, or distribute your work, subject to the terms you set out in the optional section. These include:

    •requiring licensees to attribute the work to you (or not),
    •allowing derivative works (or not),
    •allowing commercial use (or not).

This last point is key – you haven't given away your right to sell your work. A CC license is not anathema to a profit motive. In fact, by allowing open distribution and non-commercial use, you may enhance the likelihood of getting noticed by your potential buyers. That's the model that's been working for Cory Doctorow, a first-time novelist. Doctorow is enjoying healthy sales of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, simultaneously released in print by Tor Books and online in its entirety under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works license. Convinced that the Internet represents the greatest means of distribution ever devised, Doctorow decided to maximize its benefits rather than fight it. To be sure, he explains, it's a bit of an experiment to release a novel this way. "So far," Doctorow notes, "the evidence is not only that sales are not hurt, but seem to be helped" by having the novel online under a Creative Commons license.

Of course, that's not to say that there aren't philanthropic reasons to adopt the liberal terms of a CC license. One reason is to eliminate barriers to the spread of material intended for non-commercial consumption. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Open Courseware (OCW) initiative, for example, distributes the full content of dozens of MIT courses online, for free, to all comers. The terms of the CC license they've adopted prevent a publisher from picking up the curriculum and reselling it. But having granted the rights for free, non-commercial distribution contributes to OCW's mission to "provide a new model for the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration among scholars around the world."

This sort of "Some Rights Reserved" license also can be used to allow distribution and use of work that does not really have any commercial value. O'Reilly & Associates, the uber-publisher of tech books, is releasing its out-of-print books under a CC variant called the Founder's Copyright. While a book's slow sales may not justify another printing, it still might be just the thing needed by people somewhere (like that group of COBOL programmers desperately looking for documentation about their VAX system). Besides which, notes founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, "It's in my best interest to ensure that the public domain continues to be a deep well from which we all can draw."