Group Is Launching New Types of Licenses
For generations, the owners of creative material had tight control over how it was distributed. Violating someone’s copyright took a major effort. A printing plant was needed to pirate a book, a factory to bootleg an album.
The Net changed all that, making casual infringement, unauthorized borrowing and wholesale piracy effortless and pervasive. Copyright holders are responding by cracking down on violators, who in other circumstances might be customers.
Into this messy and acid-edged situation comes Creative Commons, a new nonprofit organization that will launch its first projects today. Based at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, Creative Commons has a high-profile board and an ambitious mission. The goal is to promote creativity and collaboration by developing new forms of copyright while reinvigorating the ever-shrinking sphere of copyright-free works: the public domain.
“Using the copyright system, we will make a wider, richer public domain for creators to build upon and individuals to share,” said Stanford law professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig. “Walt Disney built an empire from the riches of the public domain. We’d like to support a hundred thousand more Walt Disneys.”
As a first step, Creative Commons has developed a group of licenses that will allow copyright holders to surrender some rights to works while keeping others.
One license, for instance, allows people to copy or distribute a work as long as they give the owner credit. Another allows a work to be copied, distributed or displayed as long as it is for a noncommercial purpose. A third license permits copying but forbids using the work to make another, derivative work. (The licenses are legal documents, although that doesn’t guarantee that people will honor them.)
A license pioneer is Roger McGuinn, leader of ‘60s rock group the Byrds and more recently a folk music enthusiast. He’s licensing 80 songs through Creative Commons, giving the world permission to take his work as long as all three of his licenses are respected.
By encouraging free distribution and widespread sampling, McGuinn might end up increasing his sales. It’s an argument almost as old as the Web; Creative Commons is merely offering tools to allow it to happen on an easier, artist-sanctioned basis.
“Realistically, the first group to use these licenses will mostly be academics and hobbyists,” said Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown. “But I can imagine perfectly mainstream record companies licensing things on parts of their Web site. In our wildest dreams, in five years pretty much every kind of material will be licensed.”
That this will really happen, and that the material licensed will be things worth looking at, reading or listening to, may seem improbable. But then, so did the notion of mounting an effective challenge to the constitutionality of the current copyright law, which was the recent undertaking by several members of the Creative Commons brain trust.
The legal case arose out of the outrage felt by Eric Eldred, an Internet publisher of material in the public domain, when Congress in 1998 extended copyright terms by 20 years. The result was that no new material -- no Hemingway, no Gershwin -- will enter the public domain until 2019.
Lessig, then at Harvard, took Eldred as a client. He nursed the case through two lower court defeats and an entirely unexpected decision by the Supreme Court to review it. Oral arguments were in October; a decision is due by the end of June.
Eldred is a member of the Creative Commons board. Other members include computer science professor Hal Abelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University law professor James Boyle and former documentary filmmaker Eric Saltzman, all of them big guns in the field of cyber law.
If the Eldred case represents an attempt to short-circuit the entertainment industry’s desire to keep its old works under exclusive control for an ever-lengthening amount of time, Creative Commons was developed as an intellectual property conservancy through which control would be shared, limited or nonexistent.
The notion of loosening the bounds of copyright isn’t new. For more than a decade, the Free Software Foundation has used for its own programs and offered others a license that guarantees the freedom to share and change software. O’Reilly & Associates, a leading computer manual publisher, uses the Web to publish a number of books under open-publication licenses.
Still, the notion that creation confers ownership and that ownership is practically eternal is embedded in the system.
Since 1978, copyright protection has been automatic on any new work -- which has made it very hard to purposely free it. In response, Creative Commons has developed what it is calling the Founders’ Copyright. A creator agrees to a contract with Creative Commons to guarantee that a work will enter the public domain after just 14 years, which was the span granted by the first copyright law in 1790. O’Reilly said it will be the first to publish under these terms.
Another license puts work into the public domain immediately. One of the first works to have a public domain license will be “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” an influential book on Internet marketing that was published three years ago. It was a natural evolution, considering that the text of “Cluetrain” was posted on the Web awhile ago by the authors.
“It continues to sell well in stores and on the Web,” said one of the book’s four authors, Doc Searls. “Did having the whole text on the Web help? I think so, but we can’t tell.”
How much “Cluetrain,” as well as the experiences of O’Reilly and the Free Software Foundation, presages a wider movement toward limited licensing or the public domain is uncertain.
Critics already are wondering why a creator would donate anything to the public domain beyond, for example, an unpublished or unpublishable novel. Are people so altruistic as to create things for free? “The same thing was said about the whole Internet a few years ago,” Eldred observed. “The existence of the Web is the answer.”
