The article actually makes sense at least to some extent, especially when he talks about public domain. If creative commons indeed does put the term "creative commons" before public domain, like if it was the organization who keeps and enforces public domain, than I'd agree that it's not their business, as long as the current copyright law allows one to simply state that his work is in public domain and be done with it.

However, I think the article does misses something, an understanding of what creative commons tries to acomplish. The current copyright has a rather restrictive default license. This means that as soon as you create something and label it as copyrighted (or maybe even not?) the default and very restrictive license is applied to it granting you certain rights and powers over your work. This default license forbids copying, redistribution and derivation. However, if you just simply set certain terms which are different from those default ones and publish it along with the works (a license) than those terms are applied. Now, in that context one could say creative commons isn't really essential at all as everyone can just write some sort of license for his work and that'll be it.

However, going by that route we could than say that GNU GPL doesn't make sense either, the open source initiative, the Free Software Foundation evem etc.. In that sense, Dvorak's concerns are just senseless. How would we keep tracks of licenses and all the licensing mess we'd have if everyone were creating its own license, of which most people aren't copyright law professionals (which means most of these licenses would be very weak if confronted with a suit of some kind). Organizations like FSF, OSI or Creative Commons bring order to this world. They are introducing a choice of licenses to creators so that they don't have to do the licensing by themselves. Creative Commons provides them with the additional infrastructure to make it even more seamless. Once a creator chooses any license as his license and his terms and conditions, this license applies to his work. Creative Commons is a middleman that brings this consistency and order and eases things on creators.

There is also one another important point to Creative Commons. It is not just a licensing organization with a set of licenses to choose from and apply. It is also a lobbier for the Free Culture promoting licenses which are mostly copyleft-style ones, thus principally going against the default restrictiveness and anti-cultureness of the current copyright law. It helps unify the community around these Free Culture and copyleft ideals and focus its message in order to make it stronger and more heard. It provides a practical framework within the current copyright system where Free Culture as such can live on.

So much for it not making sense.

Related to the topic.. I have recently come to have certain doubts for how really powerful or "revolutionar" creative commons really is. Here is the article that made me see things a bit differently about this organization, and it's not really too hard to see it:

On the Creative Commons: a critique of the commons without commonalty
Is the Creative Commons missing something?

So, while creative commons did a good deal for preserving and expanding the Free Culture, it doesn't seem to be radical enough for this to cause any larger and more significant changes in the current system. It offers a number of licenses of which some are more restrictive than others. You could even say that some are closer to the real Free Culture principles while some others are farther. In a sense, it is like it provides only a bit better copy of the copyright system we have now, through its licenses, but it works extremely well as "just another option" within that system. The problem is that, just like the open source initiative (to some extent), it fits in a bit too good. It makes too little of a difference, thus being unable to actually change the system. Simply said, it fits the system instead of changing it.

So, what do I suggest? I suppose it is the same thing as the author of that Free Software Magazine author suggests and calls "commonality". It is not so bad to have a legal grid that will keep Free Culture alive in a protected microcosmos inside the current copyright law, but it is bad if we just do that and stick to that little microcosmos without pushing further and being a bit more radical, to be more in a spirit of Free Culture as it should be.

I've read the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig and I can't say his writing is that much revolutionary or radical. Too many times in a book it actually rationalizes the ways that big media today goes by in order to protect its power. His style is a typical professor-style, analyzing things as they are and then proposing an idea of something a bit different and better that can perfectly coexist with the current system. But what about changing the system itself? He indeed doesn't strike me as someone radical enough to bring on a more significant and powerful change beyond simply forming an entity that provides a legal licensing grid that can fit the Free Cultrue principles.

Anyway, read the article and see what you think. I am having a hard time explaining exactly what I mean here, but I think you'll get it once you read that article.

Feel free to discuss further.

Thanks (sorry for the long post)
Daniel

I think he's just a big troll. Nicely summed up by Everybody Loves Eric Raymond.

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Of course, the issue of whether the Creative Commons logo (with "No Reights Reserved") should be used in works under the Public Domain can be questionable. However, nothing can stop an author of using it when he or she wants to release it to the Public Domain. This is Dvorak's strongest points.

I do agree with Libervisco about the way Creative Commons has been useful within Copyright is being enforced. Of course, Dvorak is right when he says that Creative Commons actually doesn't change at all Copyright law. It really doesn't bring anything new to Copyright Law. It also doesn't bring anything new in terms of licensing products. But there are some very important things made by Creative Commons. First what Libervisco mentioned, of establishing some alternatives everyone can choose and can be acquainted with, and maintaining an orderly fashion.

The second thing that Creative Commons brings, specially to this Neo-Liberal world where everything is owned is more of a cultural awakening with respect to the issue of Copyright. Initially, Copyright was created as a way to create a balance. Which kind of balance? The ones between authors, the publishers and the public. Many people forget that Copyright was not created for the exclusive benefit of the author. When stationaries were created for the first time, and began publishing books, they stayed with all the money and gave nothing to the authors. The authors themselves did not want to write books, because they had no benefits in return, and as a result the public would be deeply affected. Copyright corrects this problem. It says: "Ok... let's give the author its own rights to have their share with the commercial use of his or her work, publishers can also have their share, and the public will benefit." The Statute of Anne in Great Britain and the U.S. Constitution did not conceive Copyright as an absolute right of authors, but a way to promote progress in the arts and sciences. In the U.S. Constitution it is even conceived as an option Congress is free to enforce, abolish or change. In a world where practically Copyright is more conceived as an absolute property of authors (who are usually also conceived as big publisshers and labels, while the real authors as people you give work for hire), Copyright has lost its balance between authors, publishers and the public.

This is worsened by the fact that digital information is free to copy and share in the vast majority of the cases. In the very beginning, Copyright made sense in this way. Average people at that time didn't have the power to copy books the way stationaries did. Here the "Copyright Bargain" made sense: People gave away their natural rights to make copies, and in exchange they received the benefit of progress of arts and sciences. If you give away something that you cannot enforce anyway, and receive in exchange a big contribution, the inevitable net result is that you're gaining. But what happens when you copy a digital document, which everyone can do very easily? Then what happens is that you don't give that right to copy ... you keep some of it at least. And that's the present problem of Copyright.

Because Copyright is conceived as "intellectual property" (a term invented in the XXth century) and hence an absolute property of "authors", any person who want to copy anything is therefore "stealing" from the author. Gradually, the so-called "fair use" rights have been disappearing, up to the point of having to pay an AOL-Warner subsidiary for a "public display" of Happy Birthday. John Buckman, the author of Magnatune.com is correct when he says that practically "fair use" and "non-commercial" means "no audience". Dvorak says that Creative Commons will help eroding "fair use". My question to Dvorak would be "How?" Big companies are doing everything they can to actually do it. If there was no problem with "fair use", there would not be Creative Commons. Alas! Creative Commons exists precisely because almost the non-existence of "fair use". Up to this level, it almost makes no difference!

Creative Commons is intended to promote Free Culture, and it is doing so. The change it brings has nothing to do with Copyright law as such, but making visible some options to people that they don't have to conceive works as being with absolute ownership, and don't have to conceive people who use and copy them as people who "steal". This itself is not a cultural "revolution", on the contrary it is returning to the point when Copyright was there to strike a balance for authors, publishers (or labels) and the public. The way it succeeds in society will depend greatly on the widespread use, but most of all in a capitalist society it will depend on whether it will be good for business.

I'm a socialist, alsmost to the point of being anarcho-syndicalist. But people are asking Creative Commons to be "revolutionary". "Revolutionary"? In what sense? Libervisco presents an article On the Creative Commons by David M. Berry and Giles Moss. As a Philosophy I mostly reject the question of authority of Gilles Deleuze & co. The field of Cultural Studies with those people are not exactly the most authoritative in anything, they did not and do not impress me. But leaving that aside, I wish to point to what Berry and Moss say in that article.

First of all, my vision of Copyright is much more liberal than Lessig's, but in the end as far as Creative Commons is concerned, it is totally irrelevant. The overcentralization on Lessig's beliefs and ideals practically misses the point of Creative Commons. He may argue for Creative Commons for capitalist reasons, but when you analyze the core of his arguments, his worry is cultural not economic. And even if it was economic. What makes the economic one so bad anyway? It criticizes Lessig's view of culture as something that is built on top of other cultural stuff. Why is this so evil, or bad, or "cramped"? Tell me one cultural thing in history (literary, musical, theatrical, artistic, etc.) that wasn't built on something else. It is impossible to point at a single cultural work that wasn't built on some other works. This doesn't mean that there was no innovation, there were many new things. "El burlador de Sevilla" of Tirso de Molina was one of the basis of Mozart's "Don Giovanni", but we can hardly say that Mozart didn't do anything really new. It is not conceived as a "reserve" but as way society evolves dynamically. We always build something new on top of something someone created before. I like the analogy Stallman stated against software patents that said that no one can really build software completely new, and he used Pierre Boulez as an example of this. Pierre Boulez said that he would create music completely from scratch .... now, who listens to Pierre Boulez today? No one!

It is also unfortunate that Berry and Moss states that Creative Commons would leave the works separated under different licenses as if it was a bad thing. Why should all works be under the same license?! Not even Stallman, who is very radical about Copyright, suggests such a thing. Maybe the "Creative Commons" title can be equivocal in the sense that it doesn't create a real "commons". But the purpose of Creative Commons is to give options to artists and authors who really wish for people to use their works, commercially or non-commercially. Software is not only an expression, it is a technology. And as a technology, all software should be free (as in freedom), the more people use it, the more it will benefit society. If software is developed within a community, no one can claim "this software is mine", and everyone can use it for commercial or non-commercial use.

However, when I write a book, what I write is not a technology, it is an expression: it is a place where I can express an idea. In a sense this is "my" expression. But "my" expression is not there for its own sake, nor is Copyright over my work an end in itself! It is to benefit society. In any other economic system, it can be conceivable to write a work and leave it in the public domain. But within this particular relations of production, it doesn't make any sense. There is ethically an inherent right for an author to be temporally compensated when his or her work is used commercially. Copyright corrects this problem. But in light of the fact that the law is practically eliminating "fair use" as well as trying to undermine the "public domain" it is important to establish the use of works where people can use it non-commercially, and guarantee the attribution of a certain work to an author.

Also not all forms of expression are the same and that's the reason why there are different licenses, not viceversa. An encyclopedia is not merely an expression of opinion, it is a place where you look information. People can actually contribute to it, the same way people contribute to Wikipedia. But if people did contribute the same way to a book I'm writing where I'm expressing my opinion, they can actually distort my opinion! So, it is good that a copylefted license be applied to an encyclopedia, but not to my book. It is simply not legitimate. Even after it goes to the public domain, anyone who builds on my work would have to make clear that it is built on my book and has to distinguish clearly my opinion from his or hers.

Sometimes it can be beneficial to have commercial licenses, to let people use a material commercially. Other times it should not be used commercially. From an ethical point of view it is unfair for authors not to have a share for the profit when their work is used commercially by a publisher for profit. In other ways, it can be conceivable and even useful for authors to let people use their works commercially or non-commercially. But either way Creative Commons preserves the balance between the public, the authors and the publishers. No one is denied access to culture, and everyone is guaranteed to build his or her works on the works of others which is what culture does. You are free in any case to use works for non-commercial use, and sometimes if you use it commercially, give your share to the author.

People are often seduced with the word "revolution". It is what Uwe Poerksen has called a "plastic word", the kind of word you can place on everything and anything and seduces the people trying to grasp that concept. Why should Creative Commons be "revolutionary"? And Creative Commons is not static (I don't know where do people get that idea). Well, the licenses are more or less have remained the same (just some technical changes here and there). However, there are lots of projects being built by Creative Commons people, like their association with O'Reilly creating the Founder's Copyright, the ICommons (to export licenses to other legal systems), Sampling licenses, the creation of a Science Commons (which is extremely important), the publication of books out of print, etc. So, Creative Commons is pushing the boundaries of the system as much as it can.

I think that Creative Commons has to succeed because it has made things simpler in trying to enforce Copyright Law. There won't be as much digital "policemen" trying to watch what we copy, download, etc. About it being liable to privatization, corruption, yadda yadda yadda... the Berry and Moss just discovered the Mediterranean. All institutions made by humans are subject to corruption ... period.

Many people suggest changing the system. But many people disagree "to what kind of system". Sometimes the suggestions made by some people means we will have somethow to wait until the capitalist economy is over. In that case, without Creative Commons many artists and authors will get screwed big time. Other people suggest abolishing Copyright, but there are legitimate uses for Copyright today. Other people suggest making Copyright law a lot less restrictive (something which Lawrence Lessig agrees), but disagree to what extent. This is good for Copyright debate, but I think that in the meanwhile Creative Commons is doing everything it can to make culture possible "skipping the intermediaries". I don't see them static, but also changing and expanding the boundaries to free culture as much as it can.

Just when you think the media can't get any stupider....
Oh btw John Dvorak didn't invent a keyboard, but August Dvorak did.

Prosario_2000: I have to say I'm not well familiar with the authors of that text about creative commons without "commonality". Maybe their view is a off for creative commons. I would agree that creative commons does and did a great deal to make Free Culture possible today, and to play a role of an intermediary before the more radical changes to the system happens.

To put it shortly, I don't hold anything against Creative Commons, as well as Lawrence Lessig. I just think that we and they shouldn't be too headstrong at making ourselves appear friendly to the current system, sucking in to the corporations and such just so that they accept us better. The thing is that if we overdo that, we might end up weakening our message that is crucial if we are to ever start bringing more radical changes to the system. There should be a balance between how much are we gonna suck in to the current system and how much are we gonna radically attack that system. We shouldn't be too harsh and abrupt, I agree, but we shouldn't be too kind on it as well. Let the next revolution will be re-evolution. :-P (maybe something in between evolution and revolution). :-)

@ Ashley: That's a hillarious comic. Great stuff :-D

Hi Libervisco:

I do understand your point of not being system friendly. However, I think that most of us who use free software, open source software, and Creative Commons Licenses use them because we are highly unsatisfied with the system, not because we endorse it. While it still uses the system, in reality all what these licenses do is to hack it.

I have had horrible experiences with Copyright Law in and out of the computer world. When I was teaching Ethics last year, I had to offer a variety of readings to my students, all of them from different sources, because I was unable to find an adequate Ethics anthology in Spanish (the vast majority of them don't read English). But it would have been crazy to suggest that the students should buy all of these sources in bookstores. For instance, one of my sources were two readings (fragments) of the Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas. These two fragments come from two huge volumes costing about $75.00 each, so a student taking my Ethics course would end up paying $150.00 for those two volumes if we obeyed Copyright law. And that's just the Summa Theologica. Imagine if I would have told them to buy Plato's Dialogues, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Seneca's Moral Treatises, a specific edition of the Bible, Hume's Enquiries, Kant's Foundations for a Metaphysics of Morals, and G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Of course, if every student obeyed Copyright Law they would have spent a fortune, and we are talking here about students who have very low income, and don't receive much in Pell Grants, because the vast majority is used just to pay College alone.

Needless to say that to provide these copies to my students you needed to go through a whole bureaucratic process, plus tollerate the student complains because copying each page costs 10 cents. Obviously this is crazy. What should I do? Scratch my head and wait until the system gets fixed? When will that occur exactly? And during all that time, what should I do if my duty is to teach philosophy which means basically reading and thinking? I think Creative Commons is a way out of this. I have found some of these works in Spanish which I think are the public domain and I will be able to release under a specific format under a Creative Commons License. (Because that's another thing, if I take something from the public domain and publish it, the content is not copyrighted, but the way it is published is copyrighted). In that way, I will not have to worry too much if the Federal Government is behind me and my colleagues if I publish this material. Maybe for Dvorak this doesn't make any difference at all, but for me it is makes a very BIG difference, believe me.

I also wish to point out too that Lawrence Lessig is creator of Creative Commons, but he doesn't stay there. He also co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is practically fighting to change copyright and patent laws for the public's benefit.

That's true. I don't have much to add to that as I agree to what you explained. Creative Commons organization has a great importance for our culture as much as Free Software Foundation has in the software part of that culture.

The EFF also seems to be doing a good job at representing Free Culture ideals so, we should whole heartily support it.

The important thing is that we don't quit or that we don't stagnate. Moving forward should be our ultimate goal, growing Free Culture and growing the number of people with freedom. Hopefully, we'll soon (however you'd interpret that "soon") cross the intermediary stage and actually start changing the system itself. As always, we need a critical mass or critical amount of influence to pull that and for that, we of course need as many people as possible advocating, promoting and living a Free Culture.

Thanks
Daniel

Have you seen this article: Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement

I don't want to sound anti-cc here again (I never intended to, actually), but I think he has a point.

Free Software Foundation is very clear about what constitutes as Free Software and what not. It has a solid definition of what exactly Free Software is or can be. Creative Commons on the other hand doesn't actually provide a well defined meaning of Free Culture or Creative Commons. Basically anything that is licensed under any of the CC licenses can be called CC, but in regard to some to be universally accepted standards of freedom and ethics it doesn't draw a distinct line between which terms provide freedom and which not. Instead you have a choice of multiple licenses for multiple kinds of works. I somehow don't think every of these licenses can apply to every of these kinds of works and still have optimal freedoms intact. Those optimal freedoms aren't even yet clearly identified for any eventual recommendation of the best license for a certain work to be given.

I've been strugling on this site to find a proper definition of "Free Culture" and to categorize it's world in the best way possible. However, if I was to cut a clear and possibly well accepted definition of Free Culture than it seems to me I would be cutting a breakthrough, as the only remaining organization around who has the most to say on Free Culture, didn't seem to come to that definition already.

That, of course, leads me to some ideas. This article as a whole inspired me a bit in regard to what I can do at this point and this position, and what we at Libervis.com can do.

Maybe we should be the ones to finally clearly define Free Culture as a whole and develop definitions of what can be constituted as Free Music, Free Movies, Free Text, Free Images etc. (with Free refering to freedom), and publish and promote these definitions to the community worldwide. Maybe we could even get creative commons to finally adopt them as "official" for Creative Commons. Of course, this "definition forging" should require extensive discussions with as much people as possible here for them to be legitimate and accepted.

What do you think about all that?