Monday, July 29, 2002

Creative Commons » Home
You're making a movie and need still images. You're starting out as a photographer and want to spread the word. You're teaching a course and need materials. You've written an article and you want people to analyze it. You're building a website and need graphics. You're a digital artist who wants to collaborate with other artists. You're performing a concert and need a symphony. You've composed a symphony and want people to perform it. How will Creative Commons help you?

Cultivating a New Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a non-profit organization founded on the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works (and the power to copy, modify, and distribute their works) instead of exercising all of the restrictions of copyright law.

Giving License to Creativity: Our initial goal is to provide an easy way for people (like scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and authors--from world-renowned professionals to garage-based amateurs) to announce that their works are available for copying, modification, and redistribution. We are building a Web-based application for dedicating copyrighted works to the "public domain," and for generating flexible, generous licenses that permit copying and creative reuses of copyrighted works.

Shining a Spotlight on Sharing: We want to make it easy for people to find works that are in the public domain or licensed on generous terms. We are developing a method for labeling such works with metadata that identify their terms of use. Potential users could then search for works (say, photos of the Empire State Building) based on the permitted uses (say, noncommercial copying and redistribution).

Creative Commons plans to launch two projects in 2002. First, taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPL), Creative Commons is developing a Web application that will help people dedicate their creative works to the public domain or license them on terms more generous than copyright. Unlike the GPL, Creative Commons licenses will not be designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works.

Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, Creative Commons will create metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use the our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine-readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity.

Creative Commons will also work to build an "intellectual property conservancy." Like a land trust or nature preserve, the conservancy will protect works of special public value from exclusionary private ownership. We will encourage people to donate their copyrights to be held in public trust; in some cases, Creative Commons may purchase important works to help guarantee both their integrity and widespread availability. Our ultimate goal is to develop a rich repository of high-quality works in a variety of media, and to promote an ethos of sharing, public education, and creative interactivity.
http://www.creativecommons.org/

No comments:

Post a Comment

con·cept