What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. Lessig describes this as “a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past”[1]. Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions[2][3].

 What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

The free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”

Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs[4].

Why CC?

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

Creative Commons helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world.

Example of a CREATIVE COMMONS GREEMENT

MyThesis Hub by Zaid A. Alsmadi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

MyThesis Hub by Zaid A. Alsmadi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Enabling  Creative Commons licensing.

[vimeo 151666798 w=640 h=360]

References

1.  Lessig, Lawrence (2004). Free Culture (PDF). New York: Penguin Press. p. 8. ISBN 1-59420-006-8. Retrieved 2015-10-20.
2. Jump up^ Ermert, Monika (2004-06-15). “Germany debuts Creative Commons”. The Register.
3. Jump up^ Lessig, Lawrence (2006). “Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons and the Remix Culture”. Talking with Talis. Archived from the original (mp3) on 2008-02-05. Retrieved 2006-04-07.
4. https://creativecommons.org/