Monday, February 15, 2010

Free at last?

You are a criminal.

You are guilty of petty theft. You are a common thief. There's a pretty hefty fine for that, and maybe some time in the slammer if you did it enough.

Are you shocked? Are you saying you never stole anything? Stop lying, of course you did! We all did! We all downloaded music over Limewire, or pirated movies, or burned CD's for people. It's those damn copyright laws, and their fascist approach to media. You use something that's protected by copyright without the consent of the creator, for anything, and it's your ass.

There's gotta be another way, right? Well at long last, there is.

Enter Creative Commons, the brainchild of the Copyleft movement. The Copyleft (as opposed to Copyright) seeks to expand upon the all important public domain of media. It mainly wants to provide an alternative to "All rights reserved" aptly named "Some rights reserved."

There are 6 Main licenses with Creative Commons that people can use to distribute their work:

  1. Attribution
  2. Attribution Share Alike
  3. Attribution No Derivatives
  4. Attribution Non-Commercial
  5. Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
  6. Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives.

The above licenses are combination of the 4 "baseline" rights:

  • Attribution: The work may be copied, distributed, performed, displayed, or have works made that are based on it, but only if credit is given to the creator. This usually applies to mainstream media outlets, such as television, movies, and music. This is also why sports telecasts have a disclaimer that states that you can't rebroadcast the game without the express written consent of the agency.
  • Non-Commercial: The same as above, the difference is that the media is restricted to Non-Commercial use only.
  • No Derivatives: You can redistribute the work, but you cannot make any work derived from it.
  • Share Alike: This is a unique baseline license. It means that any work that is derived from the original can be distributed, but only under a license that is identical to the one that governs the original material.
Further explanation on licensing can be found at CC's website here: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

There's also a neat lil video that explains it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mayer_and_Bettle_2_-_Creative_Commons.ogv

What does this mean? It means that now creators can choose how they want their work to be distributed on the internet. The public domain will increase in size now thanks to these licenses, and all of it is legal, more or less.

There are some issues with Creative Commons, one of course being that it doesn't go to the extremes of copyright. Some people who push for an actual revision of copyright laws just state that CC is merely a cop-out, and puts the talent of artists in jeopardy, who's works could conceivably be legally edited or distributed by anyone without their consent.

A good example of CC licensing in action is DeviantArt, a website that I've been a member of for the past several years. A cross between Facebook and Photobucket, DeviantArt allows you to submit your works, be they poetry or pictures, and people can comment on them, fave them, and so on.

When you submit your photos, you are asked if you want to use a Creative Commons license. If you say yes, you can pick which one(s) you would like, to ensure your work is distributed the way you want. Now one of the recurring problems of DeviantArt is something called "Art Theft" where people post art that does not belong to them, and they do not give the original artist credit. If this happens, and the artist who had their work stolen has a CC license on the picture, the artist can legally sue the thief. To my knowledge this has not yet happened, and such situations are typically resolved with the offender being banned.

DeviantArt DOES have the right to delete any art they may find inappropriate or offensive, as well as use your art in various forms of media. This is all put in their ToS and AuP (Acceptable Upload Policy), both documents are the size of the Declaration of Independence and thus not many people read them. But these are rights that the site has, and Creative Commons protects the work, though this can cause problems. In a somewhat unrelated example, Virgin Mobile found itself under fire in 2007, when they used a photograph as part of an advertising campaign, and the person in the picture had not given their permission for use of the photo. The case was thrown out of court.

It'll be interesting to see where Creative Commons takes us. This could be what the people have been waiting for, or it could make the complex copyright laws that much more so, not to mention the threat of people having their work stolen and edited with or without their permission. CC is barley a decade old and it's too soon to see how it has impacted the internet, but more developments will come in the next few years.

So will this be a Go to Jail or Get Out of Jail Free card? Only time will tell.