Playground Rules Apply To Intellectual Property:Creative Commons
Posted by Marsha on August 19, 2010
My day job required me to edit a course on digital ethics and the classroom. It covered the idea of good digital citizenship, history of copyright law, fair use, and Creative Commons. Teachers need to learn about Creative Commons then turn their students on to sites that share their stuff, for free, and use Creative Commons like Flickr, Compfight, PacDV, jamendo, Google, Yahoo, blip.tv, spinXpress, FreePhotoBank… This list grows as this community grows. Teachers who want a quick link to sites could click here, Creative Commons search, to get started. But first, what is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit group made of creative people who actually want to share their work! Think about it–the me, me, me days of protect and hoard are moving over for we, we, we days where people work together and build upon the work of others. These people actually take great pride in seeing something they created become part of something else! This community of creators is growing itself simply by agreeing to respect each others’ restrictions and by giving credit where credit is due.
Creative Common is consistent with copyright laws. The difference is, as it says on their site, Creative Commons”provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.” In other words, Creative Commons give the creator the ability to change the standard copyright terms of “all rights reserved” to a more flexible “some rights reserved.”
This group, after collaborating with intellectual property experts around the world, has created a spectrum of copyright possibilities that exist between full copyright to public domain. And, they have developed a standardized way to let the creators grant copyright permissions to their work within various combinations in this spectrum.
This kind of reminds me of kindergarten playground rules were we were supposed to learn how to play nice, share, and respect everyone’s toys, except now Creative Commons’ rules apply to the playground of creative works. We all have to get along and like to bring our own stuff to the playground to share. I don’t mind you using my stuff, but I don’t want my stuff to be damaged and I don’t want you to say my stuff is your stuff even if you used my stuff to create your stuff. In other words, I want to share with you, but I want credit for the stuff of mine you borrowed to create your own cool stuff!! This stuff over here… you can do whatever you want with it. But this stuff over here…you can use, but I would like you to be more careful with it.
It is so simple it is genuis. Share, work together and respect. WOW… what a concept. I wonder what those who authored early copyright laws and regulations would think of Creative Commons.
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