Plaintext
Copyright © 2011 – Simone Aliprandi / Ledizioni
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 unported license.
You can read the text of the license at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐sa/3.0/legalcode
Simone Aliprandi «Creative commons:a user guide» Ledizioni 2011
ISBN: 9788895994550
Some parts of the books are taken from various sources
(Wikipedia,Creative Commons official website, etc.).
These parts are licensed under their specific licenses
as stated in the footnotes.
Version 2.0 Finished in May 2011 and available online
at www.aliprandi.org/cc‐user‐guide.
Please point out this URL everytime you quote/mention this book.
Please report any print, translation, or other error
and every kind of suggestion
at www.aliprandi.org/en/contact.
Thanks to the CC license applied you can download it for free
in Internet, but if you want to support and promote this kind
of cultural production please consider buying a paper version.
More details about how to order your copy at
www.aliprandi.org/cc‐user‐guide.
Cover image taken from the video “Get creative”
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/
Editor: Simone Aliprandi
Assistant editor: Marco Bruschi
Visit our websites: www.ledizioni.it and www.ledipublishing.com
Ledizioni offers reprints and new scholarly books
both in print and eformat.
Index
PREFACE............................................................................................................. 7
AUTHOR’S PRESENTATION........................................................................ 9
CHAPTER ONE
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHENOMENON ................................. 11
1. Preambles............................................................................................ 12
2. What Creative Commons is.......................................................... 13
a. The Creative Commons project........................................... 13
b. The Creative Commons Corporation ................................ 13
c. The project spirit....................................................................... 14
d. Curiosity: the origin of “Creative Commons” name.... 15
3. What Creative Commons is not ................................................. 16
a. It is not a public body with institutional duties............ 16
b. It is not a copyright collecting society like ASCAP, PRS
or similar............................................................................................ 16
c. It is not a legal advice service............................................... 17
4. The local porting of the licenses ................................................ 17
CHAPTER TWO
THE LICENSES .............................................................................................. 19
1. Basic principles ................................................................................. 20
a. A definition of “copyright license”...................................... 20
b. The license and the restriction of the work................... 20
c. The license and the acquisition of copyright................. 21
d. Licensor and licensee .............................................................. 21
e. Writing a license ........................................................................ 22
f. The sense of the standardized licenses............................. 22
2. The three different shapes of the licenses ............................ 23
a. The legal code .............................................................................. 23
b. The Commons deed.................................................................. 23
c. The Digital code .......................................................................... 24
3. The characteristics and the functioning of the licenses.. 26
a. Common features of all Creative Commons licences . 26
b. Structure and basic clauses of the Creative Commons
licenses............................................................................................... 27
c. The licenses set .......................................................................... 30
d. The update of the licenses ..................................................... 32
4. Other special Creative Commons tools................................... 32
a. CC Plus............................................................................................ 32
b. CC0 (CC Zero) ............................................................................. 34
CHAPTER THREE
SUGGESTIONS TO CORRECTLY APPLY
THE LICENSES .............................................................................................. 37
1. Basic advices for a correct approach....................................... 38
2. Before licensing ................................................................................ 39
a. Make sure your work falls within the Creative
Commons license........................................................................... 39
b. Make sure you have the rights............................................. 39
c. Make sure you understand how Creative Commons
licenses operate.............................................................................. 40
d. Be specific about what you are licensing........................ 42
e. Are you a member of a collecting society? If so, does it
allow you to CC‐license your works?..................................... 43
3. How to choose the most suitable license ............................... 43
a. Regarding the clauses of the licenses ............................... 43
b. Regarding the updating of the licenses............................ 44
c. Regarding the jurisdiction .................................................... 44
4. Legal suggestions............................................................................. 45
a. The copyright notice................................................................ 46
b. Use of logos and “visuals”....................................................... 46
5. The guided process for choosing a license............................ 49
6. Technical suggestions .................................................................... 53
a. Marking Creative Commons works: general aspects . 54
b. Marking specific kinds of files.............................................. 55
c. Publishing your work through a social networking site
or a file sharing system................................................................ 57
d. Finding works under Creative Commons licenses ...... 58
APPENDIX I
THE COMMONS DEEDS
OF THE LICENSES
(release 3.0, unported version) ............................................................. 61
APPENDIX II
THE PAGE ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS
ON WIKIPEDIA ............................................................................................. 69
Aim and influence................................................................................. 70
Governance.............................................................................................. 71
Board................................................................................................... 71
Technical Advisory Board .......................................................... 71
Audit Committee ............................................................................ 71
Types of Creative Commons licenses........................................... 72
Jurisdiction ports................................................................................... 72
Criticism.................................................................................................... 73
General criticism ............................................................................ 73
License proliferation and incompatibility........................... 74
License misuse................................................................................ 74
The Free Software Foundation ................................................. 75
Other criticisms of the non‐commercial license .............. 76
Debian................................................................................................. 76
Legal cases............................................................................................... 77
Dutch tabloid .................................................................................... 77
Virgin Mobile.................................................................................... 77
CC‐Music – Spanish Court (2006) .......................................... 77
APPENDIX III
HOW TO PUBLISH ....................................................................................... 79
APPENDIX IV
A CC REL GUIDE ........................................................................................... 91
APPENDIX V
BOOKS, ARTICLES AND WEBSITES
ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS .............................................................113
Books and articles........................................................................114
Websites...........................................................................................116
PREFACE
by Carlo Piana
Simone is an artist and a fine lawyer. Frequently the outcome
of this combination is a lawyer who ends up being an artist. On
the contrast, Simone has chosen the hard way, the one that
brings the least glamour. He has chosen to do good to humanity
through being a lawyer and disseminating legal knowledge.
His writings on copyleft and sharing the knowledge have been
inspirational to many of us in Italy, and I have welcomed the
opportunity to increase the audience by writing an English essay.
I have been an enthusiastic reader of the Italian version, and this
English one has undoubtedly more than met my expectations.
In a down‐to‐business, no‐nonsense, practical attitude,
Simone drives us through the intricacies of the Creative
Commons licensing in the real world.
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It is a new and at the same time old topic, that years of
“intellectual property” mono‐culture have hidden from sight of
both lawyers and authors or developers, so much that we have to
invent legal hacks to make ideas and software Free. Our ancestors
did not worry about this: sharing knowledge was simple and
straightforward, just as speaking, painting, playing music,
building tools and things were natural. Nowadays, the same
concepts seem to require a triple backward somersault to be put
in practice in a legal framework that makes simpler to sell the
unsalable – an idea – than sharing it. We have invented the most
powerful instrument in history after the printing press to share
knowledge – the Internet – and our entire legal system seems
shaped only to prevent this knowledge from being shared.
Artists and software developers are similar in that they
frequently despise the law, sometimes not without reason. Both
of them are in dire need of some accessible, coherent and correct
guidance on the legal aspects because there is nothing worse
than complete ignorance, barring imperfect knowledge. Simone’s
book is precisely what an artist needs to read to know what
needs to be done. Not that legal advice will be entirely avoided, if
anything goes wrong. However wise decisions can help prevent
most or all of the negative consequences.
Readers will find all of the above in this book.
AUTHOR’S PRESENTATION
This book (my first one in English) is an offspurt of a
previous book which was published in Italian in October 2008
and which has had some success in Italy. Due to this it seemed
useful to have an edition for a larger audience, outside the
borders of my country.
However, this English edition is not a mere translation of the
Italian text, but it is an adaptation in order to make it more
readable for an international audience.
After my other publications about the copyleft culture (in
the broadest sense), the inspiration for a book that is
specifically dedicated to Creative Commons came from several
years of my assiduous participation in mailing lists and public
debates concerning the use of licenses: in fact, during these
discussions a series of misunderstandings, which newbies
regularly had, consistently emerged. This is the reason I
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thought that an operating manual (with no frills and
technicalities) could finally resolve the situation.
I hope that my work will serve as an incentive for the use and
development of innovative models for the distribution of
creative works, such as Creative Commons licenses and all the
other related instruments. And now not only in the Italian
context, but all over the world I hope you enjoy reading this
book.
My special thanks to:
Julia, for her precious consulting;
Carlo, for his useful suggestions;
Mike, for his very important help in updating the book to
version 2.0
all the Italian people who have been supporting me since
the beginning of the Copyleft‐Italia.it project.
CHAPTER ONE
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
PHENOMENON
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1. PREAMBLES
At the end of the Nineties the world of artistic‐cultural
production (from publishing, music, cinema, to multimedia)
realized it had come to grips with the most innovative social
and economic phenomenon since the period of industrial
revolution: the coming of mass digital technologies and global
communications networks.
Till that period the copyright model (born in England in the
18th century during the industrial revolution and became
popular in the following two centuries in most industrialized
countries) weathered all the previous waves of technological
innovation; however the impact of this final phenomenon has
been more destabilizing. People began to no longer consider
creative works (which are the real object of copyright
protection) as one whole object together with their physical
support on which it was deliverable. A novel, to be read, did not
need to be printed on paper as a book since it could be diffused
in many ways and through various channels, thanks to digital
and communications technologies; likewise a music track did
not need to be printed on a vinyl disk or on an optical disk, nor
did a film need a VHS cassette or DVD disk.
In the same period in parallel with the mass proliferation of
digital and communications technologies, there was another
cultural and social phenomenon, one of the most interesting in
the last decades: we are referring to free and open source
software (also known with the acronym FLOSS 1) and the
related coming of the copyleft model. It was in the information
technology area (since the middle of the 80s) that the
traditional copyright model, based on the “all rights reserved”
concept, was really discussed. As a result an alternative
copyright management model was found, implemented by
enforcing innovative licenses.
This new model had already come to a certain level of
maturity in the information technology area, and it had already
1 It means “Free Libre and Open Source Software”.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 13
seen some interesting experiments in other areas of creative
production. In fact, between the end of the 90s and the
beginning of the new millennium, many pilot projects were
activated which proposed licenses that had been designed for
text, music and in general artistic works. It was in this new
wave of experimentation that the plan for the Creative
Commons project was drafted: a project which from the start
was shown to be something more structured and far‐sighted in
comparison with the projects which had previously appeared.
2. WHAT CREATIVE COMMONS IS
When we say in generic terms “Creative Commons”, at the
same time we refer to a popular project and to the non‐profit
body which is behind it.
A. THE CREATIVE COMMONS PROJECT
The project, born from the initiative of legal and computer
science scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is actually very
articulated; it is now present in over fifty countries around the
world and supported by eminent intellectuals from different
fields. Under its control there are other thematic sub‐projects
that are really important for their cultural far‐sightedness.
The main objective of this project is therefore to promote a
global debate on new paradigms of copyright management and
to diffuse legal and technological tools (such as the licenses and
all the services related), which can allow for a “some rights
reserved” model in cultural products distribution.
B. THE CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION
In the beginning, the promoters and the supporters of the
project organized a non‐profit body with which to trace the
dissemination activities connected to the project and thus to
receive funding.
From a legal point of view the Creative Commons
Corporation is a 501(c)(3) tax‐exempt charitable corporation
with its registered office in San Francisco. Presently it has no
subsidiaries. Creative Commons forms agreements with pre‐
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existing entities such as universities and research centers that
are called “Affiliate Institutions” and which carry out local,
national, and regional Creative Commons activities such as
education, events, license porting, promoting adoption of
Creative Commons tools, and translation.
C. THE PROJECT SPIRIT
At http://wiki.creativecommons.org/History there is a
short introduction to the Creative Commons project and to its
purposes: here below follows the complete text.
«Too often the debate over creative control tends to the
extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control – a world in
which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all
rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end
is a vision of anarchy – a world in which creators enjoy a wide
range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance,
compromise, and moderation – once the driving forces of a
copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally
– have become endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use
private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for
certain uses. Like the free software and open‐source
movements, our ends are cooperative and community‐minded,
but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer
creators a best‐of‐both‐worlds way to protect their works while
encouraging certain uses of them – to declare “some rights
reserved.”»
This mission is well described in a picture where Creative
Commons symbolically represents a median shading between
the “all rights reserved” model (characteristic of the classic
copyright idea) and the “no rights reserved” (characteristic of a
public domain idea or of a sort of no‐copyright concept).
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 15
D. CURIOSITY: THE ORIGIN OF “CREATIVE COMMONS” NAME
Economist Garret Hardin published an interesting article in
1968 entitled “The tragedy of the commons”. In this article he
displays his sharp interpretation of one of the most debated
economic‐social dilemmas.
In a nutshell, according to Hardin commons, i.e. those goods
which are owned by nobody but which can be exploited by
everybody, are always destined to a sad ending. He uses the
metaphor of herders sharing a common parcel of land, «on
which they are all entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s
view, it is in each herder’s interest to put as many cows as
possible onto the land, even if the commons is damaged as a
result. The herder receives all of the benefits from the
additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by
the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational
decision, however, the commons is destroyed and all herders
suffer» 2.
Creative Commons theorists, and first of all Lawrence
Lessig, argue instead that in the case of goods like creative and
intellectual products, this problem does not exist because every
creation increases its social value with the more people there
are who can benefit from it. Furthermore, those goods are not
liable to deterioration nor to a natural shortage because human
creativity has no limits. Thus, we can validly talk about a
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons.
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“comedy of the commons”, where the goods at issue are
precisely the creative commons.
3. WHAT CREATIVE COMMONS IS NOT
There are numerous misunderstandings created about the
role and the function of Creative Commons. Therefore it is
necessary to debunk at once the most diffused and dangerous
ones.
A. IT IS NOT A PUBLIC BODY WITH INSTITUTIONAL DUTIES
Creative Commons Corporation as a civil law body, does not
have any institutional role in any of the countries where the
related project is active. This does not mean that some
exponents of the cooperating community (and in any case also
some members of the board) have not had the occasion to
contact the public institutions of some countries in order to
extensively inform about the new problematic areas of
copyright theory. However, this is only in a perspective of
cultural and scientific debate, not with a political overtone.
B. IT IS NOT A COPYRIGHT COLLECTING SOCIETY LIKE ASCAP,
PRS OR SIMILAR
One of the most diffused and also misleading
misunderstandings consists in mixing up Creative Commons
with an alternative version of a copyright collecting society,
which are present in every country and do not have the same
exact function.
Quoting the Wikipedia definition, a copyright collecting
society is «a body created by private agreements or by
copyright law that collects royalty payments from various
individuals and groups for copyright holders. They may have the
authority to license works and collect royalties as part of a
statutory scheme or by entering into an agreement with the
copyright owner to represent the owners interests when
dealing with licensees and potential licensees.» 3
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 17
Creative Commons does not have a contractual relationship
with copyright holders and does not hold a representation or
enforcing role with regard to authors’ rights.
C. IT IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE SERVICE
Neither the Creative Commons Corporation nor the
communities and working groups connected to it provide legal
advice or a legal aid service. Besides Creative Commons – as we
wrote above – does not have any intermediation role; thus it
cannot nor take the liability for the effects derived from the use
of licenses.
To clear any kind of ambiguity, this is specified by an explicit
preamble included at the beginning of every license 4: «Creative
Commons Corporation is not a law firm and does not provide
legal services. Distribution of this license does not create an
attorney‐client relationship. Creative Commons provides this
information on an “as‐is” basis. Creative Commons makes no
warranties regarding the information provided, and disclaims
liability for damages resulting from its use.»
4. THE LOCAL PORTING OF THE LICENSES
As we partially discussed, the Creative Commons project is
set out in:
‐ a central associational body, which is the official owner of
the trademark rights, of the domain name
“www.creativecommons.org” (and other connected domain
names), and of the copyright on the official material published
on the websites; and
‐ a network of Affiliate Institutions that act as points of
reference for the several national Creative Commons projects
scattered worldwide. This “hierarchical” composition (that from
some people’s point of view can seem to be not very suitable to
the spontaneous/collective nature of the opencontent culture)
allows to check the correct porting of the licenses and to realize
4 In the “legal code” version.
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information and sensitization activities in an effective and
coordinated way.
All the national Creative Commons projects are organized in
two divisions: one dedicated to the legal aspects, such as the
translation, the adaptation and explication of the licenses; and
the other dedicated to the information‐technology aspects, such
as implementing technological solutions that exploit the
Creative Commons resource. We can foresee a third division
(crosswise two others) aimed at the sensitization and
promotion of the Creative Commons philosophy; it organizes
public events, manages mailing‐lists and web‐forums, creates
informative material.
The idea of “license porting” involves a translation of the
licenses into various languages, but also a concurring
adaptation of the terms to the different legal systems. The other
types of open content licenses, although they are diffused in
different languages from the original, include a clause that, in
the case of unclear interpretations, the involved operator (a
judge, a lawyer...) has to refer to the text in the original
language, which is the only one with an official character. Other
types of licenses instead do not worry as much about the
interpretation aspect as for the identification of the governing
law, stating expressly that the “XY license” is regulated by the
Japanese (or French, or Italian, etc.) law.
Creative Commons has tried to obviate both problems by
implementing an important activity of “localization” of the
licenses, that is devolved to the various Affiliate Institutions and
monitored by the central body in the US. This way, the Italian,
French and Japanese licenses are not mere translations of the
American licenses, but basically independent licenses in
accordance with the legal system of each country.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LICENSES
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1. BASIC PRINCIPLES
First of all, to avoid falling into the most common
misunderstandings about Creative Commons licenses, we
should set the tenets that are valid for all the open content
licenses.
A. A DEFINITION OF “COPYRIGHT LICENSE”
A copyright license is a legal instrument with which the
copyright holder rules the use and distribution of his work.
Thus, it comes to a civil law tool which (based on copyright)
helps to clear up for users what can or cannot be done with
the work. The “license” term comes from the Latin verb
“licere” and generically represents permission, in fact its
main function is to authorize uses of the work. 5
B. THE LICENSE AND THE RESTRICTION OF THE WORK
By clearing up the concept of license we can understand
how one of the main misunderstandings about open content
licenses is groundless: i.e. the one according to which a
license can be a form of restriction of a copyrighted work. In
fact, it is not the license itself which restricts the work;
default copyright restricts creative works, while an open
content license moves exactly in the opposite direction. In
effect, one of the main purposes of an open content license
is to authorize some kinds of use which would not be
normally allowed in the traditional copyright model (i.e. the
“all rights reserved” model).
5 «The verb license or grant license means to give permission. The noun
license refers to that permission as well as to the document
memorializing that permission. License may be granted by a party
(“licensor”) to another party (“licensee”) as an element of an agreement
between those parties. A shorthand definition of a license is "an
authorization (by the licensor) to use the licensed material (by the
licensee).» Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 21
C. THE LICENSE AND THE ACQUISITION OF COPYRIGHT
For the same principle the application of a license has
nothing to do with the acquisition of copyright on the
creative work and even less with the proof or protection of
the authorship. The application of a license on a creative
work concerns a subsequent phase in regard to the
acquisition of copyright and to the obtainment of a proof of
authorship. Therefore, first of all the author gets the
copyright on his work (automatically 6), then he decides to
regulate his rights by applying a license.
D. LICENSOR AND LICENSEE
Let’s start from the presupposition that the only subject
who has the title to rightfully apply a license to a creative work
is the owner of all its rights. The subject is usually the author of
the work, but he can transfer all his rights by a contract to
another subject (for example a publisher, an agency, a
production company...); in this case he would also lose the
possibility to choose the type of license to apply to the work. In
order to avoid misunderstandings (and since it is not so
important for our analysis what kind of subject would make
this choice), we will always talk about “licensor” to generically
mean the copyright holder who decides to apply a license to it.
An open content license produces effects on a variety of
indeterminate subjects. These subjects can be mere end‐users
of the work (readers, listeners, spectators...); but in some cases
(those licenses which allow for modification and re‐publication
6 «Time was you had to put Big C [i.e. the copyright symbol: ©] on
anything you wanted to copyright or else it entered the public domain –
the commons of information where nothing is owned and all is permitted.
You had to put the world on notice to warn them. That was Big C’s job and
it was a useful one. What changed? The law. By the late 1980s U.S. law had
changed so that works become copyrighted automatically the moment
they’re made. The moment you hit save on that research paper... the
second the shutter snaps closed... the instant you lift your pen from that
cocktail napkin doodle... your creation is copyrighted whether Big C
makes a cameo or not.» Taken from the script of the most famous
Creative Commons informative video, called “Get Creative” and available at
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/.
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of the work) they can also be active subjects in the virtuous
mechanism of the open content phenomenon.
Therefore, also in this case we shall use an all‐embracing
term which can indicate every potential recipient of the license:
that is the “licensee”. We shall use the expression “licensed
work” to represent the work to which the license has been
applied.
E. WRITING A LICENSE
Since this is a civil law issue (more precisely the contractual
law), there are not any specific procedures to follow or
formalities to respect. Thus, every author (or other copyright
holder) is free to write his own personal license and to apply it
to his work. However, like every legal instrument, in order to
take advantage of all the tools and protections provided for by
the law, it is necessary to take into account the technicalities of
civil law. Indeed a copyright license is a legal document which
needs preparation and expertise.
In other words, the concrete problem is that a poorly
written license without the proper language or without
important clauses, would probably not perform its function or
could even have a boomerang effect on the licensor.
F. THE SENSE OF THE STANDARDIZED LICENSES
If we rigorously exclude the “do it yourself”, there are two
possible ways: either the licensor can consult a lawyer to draw
up a license (but this could also be expensive); or he can trust
the standardized licenses that are released by specific projects
and non‐profit organizations such as Creative Commons, the
Free Software Foundation, and the Apache Software
Foundation.
An essential aspect should be clear: these organizations do
in no way become the parties of the case, thus they are not
liable for each application of the licenses; nor do they directly
deal with legal advice related to the use of their licenses. These
bodies only act as compilers and promoters of the licenses; it is
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 23
possible to interact with the staff of these projects, sending
comments, indicating case studies, starting public debates, but it
is unthinkable that they should have to be involved in every
single case. Every copyright holder who decides to apply a
standardized license to his work should take full responsibility
for it; therefore it is important to be well informed.
2. THE THREE DIFFERENT SHAPES OF THE LICENSES
In this section we will show why the Creative Commons
licenses is a cut above the other open content licenses.
The clever discovery of the promoters of the project was in
fact to release every license in three representations that are
different by the form but connected by the essence.
A. THE LEGAL CODE
The proper license (i.e. the representation that shall be
legally relevant) is the so‐called “Legal code”, made up of several
preambles and eight articles, where the distribution of the
licensed work is regulated.
Many people though realized that the average license user is
not induced to read and understand a document like that:
sometimes he disregards it intentionally, sometimes he does not
have adequate preparation to do so. Therefore, the risk is that
the licenses would be used inaccurately with little knowledge;
that false information on their use would be easily diffused; or
that a sort of mistrust would prevail so that authors and
publishers would stay far away from these tools.
B. THE COMMONS DEED
Hence Creative Commons thought of designing brief
explanations of the license that are written in clear language and
structured with simple and schematic graphics: this second
“shape” of the licenses is called the “Commons deed”.
However, it is important to remember that «the Commons
Deed is not a license. It is simply a handy reference for
understanding the Legal Code (the full license) – it is an easy
readable expression of some of its key terms. Think of it as the
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user‐friendly interface to the Legal Code underneath. This Deed
itself has no legal value, and its contents do not appear in the
actual license.» 7
Therefore the Commons deed in a fews lines condenses the
sense of the license and makes a link to the Legal code along
with the various available translations of the licenses.
C. THE DIGITAL CODE
Finally, the third “shape” of the licenses is called “digital
code”, that is metadata – data about data – a description of the
license that can be understood by computer programs such as
search engines.
Thus, Creative Commons developers designed a metadata
system called CCREL (“Creative Commons Rights Expression
Language”) with which it is possible to annotate licensed
works, facilitating functionality such as copy/paste HTML for
using a work with licensor‐specified attribution and correct
license notice, and license‐aware search.
7 This disclaimer is linked by every Commons deed.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 25
(this picture is taken from www.creativecommons.org)
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3. THE CHARACTERISTICS AND THE FUNCTIONING OF THE
LICENSES
As we has already explained, the Creative Commons licenses
are inspired by a “some rights reserved” model: that means that
the copyright holder, applying a Creative Commons license,
decides to keep just several rights of all the rights granted to
him by law.
A. COMMON FEATURES OF ALL CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCES 8
All Creative Commons licenses have many important
features in common.
i) From the licensor’s point of view
Every license will help you:
• retain your copyright;
• announce that other people’s fair use, first sale, and free
expression rights are not affected by the license.
Every license requires licensees:
• to get your permission to do any of the things you choose
to restrict (e.g., make a commercial use, create a derivative
work);
• to keep any copyright notice intact on all copies of your
work;
• to link to your license from copies of the work;
• not to alter the terms of the license;
• not to use technology to restrict other licensees’ lawful
uses of the work;
Every license allows licensees, provided they live up to your
conditions:
• to copy the work;
• to distribute it;
• to display or perform it publicly;
8 This section is partially taken from
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Baseline_Rights and from
http://www.creativecommons.org.au/materials/whatiscc.pdf.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 27
• to make digital public performances of it (e.g.,
webcasting);
• to shift the work into another format as a verbatim copy.
ii) From the licensee’s point of view
When you use any CC material, you must always:
• attribute the creator of the work 9;
• get permission from the creator to do anything that goes
beyond the terms of the license (eg. making a commercial use
of the work or creating a derivative work where the license
does not permit this);
• keep any copyright notice attached to the work intact on
all copies of the work;
• name the CC license and provide a link to it from any
copies of the work; and
• where you make changes to the work, acknowledge the
original work and indicate that changes have been made (eg by
stating ‘This is a French translation of the original work, X’).
In addition, when you use any CC material, you must not:
• alter the terms of the license;
• use the work in any way that is prejudicial to the
reputation of the creator of the work;
• imply that the creator is endorsing or sponsoring you or
your work; or
• add any technologies (such as digital rights management)
to the work that restrict other people from using it under the
terms of the license.
B. STRUCTURE AND BASIC CLAUSES OF THE CREATIVE
COMMONS LICENSES
Creative Commons licenses are ideally structured in two
parts: the first part indicates the “freedoms” that the author
9 For information on how to attribute a work, see the specific guide “How
to Attribute Creative Commons Material” at
http://creativecommons.org.au/materials/attribution.pdf.
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wants to allow about his work; the second part explains the
conditions on which is allowed to be used.
Regarding the first part (the “freedoms” that the licensor
concedes to the licensees) we can say that all the licenses allow
the copying and the distribution of the work, using the
following words and the following visuals:
«You are free to to Share – to copy,
distribute and transmit the work»
On the other hand, only some licenses (not all of them)
allow the licensees to also modify the work, specifying this with
the following simple phrase and visual:
«You are free to Remix – to adapt the
work»
Regarding the second part (the conditions made by the
licensor to use his work) we can say that Creative Commons
licenses are articulated into four basic clauses which the
licensor can choose and match to his needs
Attribution – «You must attribute the
work in the manner specified by the
author or licensor (but not in any way
that suggests that they endorse you or
your use of the work).»
This clause is a feature in every license. It states that every
time we use the work we must clearly indicate who the author
is.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 29
Non Commercial – «You may not use
this work for commercial purposes.»
This means that if we distribute copies of the work, we can
not do it in any way which is primarily intended for or directed
toward commercial advantage or private monetary
compensation. To do this, we have to ask the licensor for
specific permission.
No Derivatives – «You may not alter,
transform, or build upon this work.»
If we want to modify, to correct, to translate or to remix the
work, we have to ask the licensor for specific permission.
Share Alike – «If you alter, transform,
or build upon this work, you may
distribute the resulting work only under
the same or similar license to this one.»
This clause (as it is in the Free Software model) grants that
the “freedoms” conceded by the author will be also kept on the
derivative works (and on the derivative ones of the derivative
ones, with a persistent effect).
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C. THE LICENSES SET
From the matching of these four basic clauses we have the
six sheer Creative Commons licenses, which are named by
referring to the clauses shown in the previous section.
They are (from the most permissive to the most restrictive):
Attribution
Attribution – Share Alike
Attribution – No Derivatives
Attribution– Non Commercial
Attribution – Non Commercial –
Share Alike
Attribution – Non Commercial –
No Derivatives
There are two essential points in this list:
‐ the “Attribution” clause is present in every license;
‐ the “No Derivatives” clause and the “Share Alike” clause are
incompatible with each other (in fact, the first one denies the
modification of the work, while the second implicitly gives
permission to modify the work).
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 31
At the official Creative Commons web‐site 10 there is a more
detailed explanation about every single license:
Attribution
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon
your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for
the original creation. This is the most accommodating of
licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your
works licensed under Attribution.
Attribution – Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work
even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and
license their new creations under the identical terms. This
license is often compared to open source software licenses. All
new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any
derivatives will also allow commercial use.
Attribution – No Derivatives
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non‐
commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in
whole, with credit to you.
Attribution – Non Commercial
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work
non‐commercially, and although their new works must also
acknowledge you and be non‐commercial, they don’t have to
license their derivative works on the same terms.
Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work
non‐commercially, as long as they credit you and license their
new creations under the identical terms. Others can download
and redistribute your work just like the by‐nc‐nd license, but
they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories
based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry
the same license, so any derivatives will also be non‐
commercial in nature.
10 Taken from http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses.
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Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses,
allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free
advertising” license because it allows others to download your
works and share them with others as long as they mention you
and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or
use them commercially.
D. THE UPDATE OF THE LICENSES
As has happened for most of the organizations which
release standardized licenses, the text of the Creative Commons
licenses is subjected to irregular updates due to the possible
need to improve, specify, complete, or eliminate some of the
clauses. It can depend on various factors, such as the evolution
of the market and technological innovation that bring new
topics to consider in the licenses.
At the date of the writing of this book (August 2010) the
Creative Commons licenses are at version 3.0. 11
4. OTHER SPECIAL CREATIVE COMMONS TOOLS
At the end of 2007 Creative Commons launched two new
interesting projects which aim to enrich the supply of services
besides the mere licenses. We are referring to two tools which
play two different roles, thanks to which the licensors can
communicate additional information besides the information
that is already provided by the licensing process.
A. CC PLUS
As written on the Creative Commons website, CC Plus is «a
protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond
the rights granted by a CC license» 12.
CC Plus is a single annotation which denotes that further
permissions beyond those already provided by the license may
be available.
11 Not in every country.
12 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCPlus.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 33
«For example, a work’s Creative Commons license might
offer noncommercial rights. With CC Plus, the license can also
provide a link by which a user might secure rights beyond
noncommercial rights – most obviously commercial rights, but
also additional permissions or services such as warranty,
permission to use without attribution, or even access to
performance or physical media.» 13
To better understand, let’s reflect on one of the most typical
cases: the case of an independent music label which publishes
songs with a “Non Commercial” license on its website. Thus, the
songs licensed this way can be freely downloaded and used for
non commercial purposes. All the same, for those who want to
also make commercial use, the label decides to provide special
conditions (for example the payment of a fee or the application
of an advertising message); so it entrusts its legal office with the
writing of a separate license in which there are the clauses that
the licensees shall respect to make commercial use of the
songs.
The text of this separate license can be published in a
special page of the label’s website, but in order for it to be
noted on a Creative Commons deed, the CC Plus annotation
comes into play.
Therefore, under the classic disclaimer where the
application of the Creative Commons license is we will find the
following phrase: “permissions beyond the scope of this license
may be available at...”; and here we will add the web address
where the supplementary license is located.
The same type of argument is valid for licenses which
contain any of the “attribution”, “no derivative works”, or “share
alike” clauses, and to which the licensor wants to add offer
different terms to allow use of the work without providing
credit or the modification of the work outside of compliance
with the CC license terms offered.
Here is a hypothetical use of CC Plus:
13 http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCPlus.
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More details about this tool are available at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCPlus.
B. CC0 (CC ZERO) 14
CC0 is another interesting project by Creative Coommons: it
is a tool that allows creators to effectively place their works in
the public domain through a waiver of all copyright to the
extent permitted by law.
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators
and owners of copyright‐protected content to waive copyright
interests in their works and thereby place them as completely
as possible in the public domain, in order for others to freely
build on, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes
without restriction under copyright.
In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright holders to
choose from a range of permissions while retaining their
copyright, CC0 empowers another choice altogether – the
choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it
automatically grants to creators – the “no rights reserved”
alternative to our licenses.
In effect, we know that copyright and other laws throughout
the world automatically extend copyright protection to works of
authorship and databases, whether the author or creator wants
those rights or not. CC0 gives people who want to give up those
rights a way to do so, to the fullest extent allowed by law. Once the
creator or a subsequent owner of a work applies CC0 to a work,
the work is no longer his or hers in any meaningful legal sense.
Anyone can then use the work in any way and for any purpose,
including commercial purposes, subject to rights others may
14 This section is partially taken from
http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 and from
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 35
have in the work or how the work is used. Think of CC0 as the
“no rights reserved” option.
And how does it work? A person using CC0 (called the
“affirmer” in the legal code) waives all of his or her copyright
along with neighboring and related rights in a work, to the
fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver is not effective for
any reason, then CC0 acts as a license from the affirmer
granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non exclusive,
royalty free license to use the work for any purpose
In substance, it consists in a procedure thanks to which the
author certifies publicly that he wants to disclaim totally and
irrevocably to exercise his rights, so that the work can be
considered immediately in a public domain status. It can be
implemented by helping the author to “sign” (even virtually)
this declaration of purpose and by keeping a public evidence of
it. Here is the screen‐shot of the CC0 procedure.
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CHAPTER THREE
SUGGESTIONS TO CORRECTLY APPLY
THE LICENSES
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1. BASIC ADVICES FOR A CORRECT APPROACH
As we have just seen, applying licenses to our works brings
a sort of self‐management of our rights, which goes beyond the
traditional network of intermediaries involved in copyright
management. This is a relatively new practice and is strictly
connected to the evolution of the communication world came
thanks to the digital and communications technologies.
In essence, each single author has to take on assessments
and decisions, which in the traditional system had always been
a prerogative of specialized dealers who had the necessary
expertise and practice. The risk that this important phase will
be managed with imprudence and inaccuracy is very high; and
this – as we have already mentioned – could turn into a
tremendous boomerang also damaging the author/licensor
himself.
That is why – in spite of the disintermediation attitude
which is innate in open content licenses – it is in any case a
good idea to always consult with a professional who can at least
clarify the biggest doubts.
However, most of the licensing operations are generally
managed by the licensor himself. Thus, before releasing the
work with the chosen license, it is important that the licensor
has an overall view of all the available tools, such as the official
websites of the various projects which promote the licenses,
the publications dedicated to these topics, the specialized
forums and mailing lists. He should also attend the specialized
events organized in this field.
On the other hand, it is also important to know how to select
the information found in less official channels, to avoid falling
victim to misinformation. Therefore, it is essential to gather
some information, in order not to risk experiencing unpleasant
situations and then having to repair the damage too late with
the help of specialized professionals.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 39
2. BEFORE LICENSING 15
The following list sets out some basic things that you should
think about before you apply a Creative Commons license to
your work.
A. MAKE SURE YOUR WORK FALLS WITHIN THE CREATIVE
COMMONS LICENSE
Creative Commons licenses apply to works that are
protected by copyright. Generally, works that are protected by
copyright are: books, scripts, websites, lesson plans, blogs and
any other forms of writings; photographs and other visual
images; films, video games and other visual materials; musical
compositions, sound recordings and other audio works.
Creative Commons licenses do not apply to things such as
ideas, factual information or other things that are not protected
by copyright. If you are based in the US, you can find out more
about what is and is not capable of copyright protection at this
site. If you are based in the UK, visit this site. If you are based in
Taiwan, the relevant statutory provisions are Articles 9 and
10bis.
B. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHTS
Before applying a Creative Commons license to a work, you
need to make sure you have the authority to do so. This means
that you need to make sure that the person who owns the
copyright in the work is happy to have the work made available
under a Creative Commons license.
If you are the creator of the work, then you are probably the
owner of copyright and so can license the work how you wish.
If you made the work as part of your employment, then your
employer probably owns the rights to the work and so only
your employer can decide to apply a Creative Commons license.
If you made the work under an agreement, you need to check
15 This section is taken from
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing.
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the terms of that agreement to see if the rights to the work
were transferred to someone else.
If you are combining pre‐existing works made by other
people (unless those works are in the public domain, and thus
there is no one from whom permission is required) or working
in conjunction with other people to produce something, you
need to make sure that you have express and explicit
permission to apply a Creative Commons license to the end
result (unless your use of the pre‐existing works constitutes fair
use, and thus no permission is required). You don’t have this
kind of permission in the case of, say, a Madonna CD or a Italo
Calvino novel, that you purchase, because these are made
available under “all rights reserved” copyright. You can only
secure this kind of permission if you are in direct contact with
the person, discuss Creative Commons licensing with them and
they agree to a specific license; of course, if you are combining
a work that is already Creative Commons‐licensed then you will
also have the rights, provided your use is consistent with the
terms of that license!
C. MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND HOW CREATIVE COMMONS
LICENSES OPERATE
Before you apply a Creative Commons license to your work,
you should make sure you understand how they operate. You
can do this by reviewing the FAQ and/or ask specific questions
and voice your concerns on our discussion fora. Below is an
overview of some of the key elements of the Creative Commons
licensing model.
How does a Creative Commons license operate?
Creative Commons license are based on copyright. So it
applies to all works that are protected by copyright law. The
kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books,
websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other
audio & visual recordings, for example. Software programs are
also protected by copyright but, as explained in the FAQ, we
strongly recommend that you do not apply a Creative Commons
license to software.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 41
Creative Commons licenses give you the ability to dictate
how others may exercise your copyright rights–such as the
right of others to copy your work, make derivative works or
adaptations of your work, to distribute your work and/or make
money from your work. They do not give you the ability to
restrict anything that is otherwise permitted by exceptions or
limitations to copyright–including, importantly, fair use or fair
dealing–nor do they give you the ability to control anything that
is not protected by copyright law, such as facts and ideas.
Creative Commons licenses attach to the work and
authorize everyone who comes in contact with the work to use
it consistent with the license. This means that if Bob has a copy
of your Creative Commons‐licensed work, Bob can give a copy
to Carol and Carol will be authorized to use the work
consistent with the Creative Commons license. You then have a
license agreement separately with both Bob and Carol.
Creative Commons licenses are expressed in three different
formats: the Commons Deed (human‐readable code), the Legal
Code (lawyer‐readable code); and the metadata (machine
readable code). You don’t need to sign anything to get a Creative
Commons license–just select your license at our ‘License’ page.
One final thing you should understand about Creative
Commons licenses is that they are all non‐exclusive. This
means that you can permit the general public to use your work
under a Creative Commons license and then enter into a
separate and different non‐exclusive license with someone else,
for example, in exchange for money.
What if I change my mind?
This is an extremely important point for you to consider.
Creative Commons licenses are non‐revocable. This means that
you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a
Creative Commons license, from using the work according to
that license. You can stop offering your work under a Creative
Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not affect
the rights with any copies of your work already in circulation
under a Creative Commons license. So you need to think
carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make
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sure that you are happy for people to be using your work
consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop
distributing your work.
For some creators and/or licensors, this is not an important
issue. If you are an amateur photographer, and you’ve just
taken a cool picture of Mt. Fuji, there may be little risk to you if
you decide to make it available under our freest license that
reserves only the right of attribution. But if you’re a musician
who depends upon your music for your livelihood, you should
think carefully before giving away commercial rights to your
creative work. Many musicians have discovered that offering
work for noncommercial use can be quite rewarding. But
anything beyond that requires careful consideration. We all
admire generous souls. But if you want to be generous, we want
you to think carefully about it before you are.
D. BE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE LICENSING
You need to be specific about exactly what you are CC‐
licensing when you apply the Creative Commons license to
your work. We give you the option of identifying the format of
the work in the metadata (text, audio, video, image, interactive)
and you should use this. This enables more precise machine‐
readable language.
However, you should also think about exactly which
elements of your work you are licensing. For example, in the
case of a website, are you licensing just the text and images? Or
also the stylesheets and the code that run the site? Similarly, if
you make CC‐licensed music available for download on your
site, does the Creative Commons license apply to both the
musical composition and the sound recording as well as any
artwork and graphics at your site? And remember, as discussed
under “Make sure you have the rights” above, you need to make
sure you have the rights to each element that you license under
a Creative Commons license.
Take a moment to think about exactly what you are
intending to license and then frame your metadata and legal
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 43
notice accordingly, eg. “All images at this site are licensed under
a Creative Commons [insert description] 2.5 license.”
E. ARE YOU A MEMBER OF A COLLECTING SOCIETY? IF SO, DOES
IT ALLOW YOU TO CC‐LICENSE YOUR WORKS?
You need to check with your society. Currently, many of the
collecting societies in Australia, Finland, France, Germany,
Luxembourg, Spain, Taiwan and the Netherlands take an
assignment of rights (or in France what is called a “mandate” of
rights that nonetheless has the same effect practically as an
assignment) from you in present and future works (so that
they effectively become the owner of these rights) and manage
them for you. So if you are already a member of a collecting
society in one of these jurisdictions, you may not be entitled to
license your work yourself under a Creative Commons license
because the necessary rights are not held by you but by the
collecting society. Please also read the FAQ on the website of the
Creative Commons project team for your jurisdiction for more
information about this issue in your jurisdiction.
Creative Commons is reaching out to collecting societies in
those jurisdictions where this problem arises to try to find a
solution that enables creators of content to enjoy the benefits
both systems offer.
3. HOW TO CHOOSE THE MOST SUITABLE LICENSE
A. REGARDING THE CLAUSES OF THE LICENSES
First of all, it is important not to be fooled by the idea that
the terms of the license shall also constrain the licensor. It is a
fairly widespread misconception that an author applies a
license with the possibility to modify the work for fear of being
unable to modify it; or that he applies a license with the
possibility to commercialize the work because in the future he
intends to commercialize it.
Such an approach makes little sense and reflects confusion
on the basic functioning of the licenses. Let’s keep in mind that
the essential function of licensing is to communicate to
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licensees which uses are granted freely and under what
conditions. The licensor, as the copyright holder, always has the
possibility to do what is not permitted by the license. On the
other hand, the criterion for the selection of certain types of
clauses is usually reversed: if I choose the term “non‐
commercial” it is precisely because I want to reserve the right
to commercialize the work for myself (or possibly for a
publisher or an agency with whom I have contractual
relationships), forbidding the commercialization to others.
The same applies to the “No Derivatives” clause.
B. REGARDING THE UPDATING OF THE LICENSES
From the point of view of the licensor, we can say that it is
best to choose to apply the most recent available license, so that
you can take advantage of the processing implemented by the
Creative Commons team of lawyers. It follows that in the case of
the publication of a new version of the license, it is
recommended to update the notice of the recall and the link to
the license.
But we cannot exclude cases where the licensor considers
that an older version of the license is better and he does not
want to update the copyright notice.
C. REGARDING THE JURISDICTION
The choice of jurisdiction is one of the most delicate aspects,
since it requires some rudiments of international law.
Moreover, the legal aspect is further complicated by the social
and technological one; since Creative Commons licenses tools
are designed primarily for the digital world, it is really difficult
to circumscribe the life of the license to a specific jurisdiction in
advance.
Let us explain better. Firstly, we consider that the criterion
for choosing the most appropriate jurisdiction is not so much
what the nationality of the licensor is, but rather the context in
which the work will play the main part of his life. Thus, in a
hypothetical case, if we have an Italian author who writes a
novel in French, but the novel is primarily intended for the
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 45
Belgian market, then the Belgian jurisdiction will be the most
indicated one. That is true at least in principle, but consider that
the choice of jurisdiction involves some significant legal
consequences: in fact, in a potential litigation about the use of
the work, we must refer to the rules of Belgium, and in some
cases be ready to start a civil case before a Belgian court.
It is very difficult even for experts to make assessments,
since in the current globalized world of communications no one
can predict for sure in what context the work will circulate
predominantly in and for how long.
These – mind you – are rather theoretical and hypothetical
reflections; for a correct diagnosis it is necessary to assess each
situation. In most cases using an “unported” license written for
an international audience is the most reasonable choice, and is
the default in many systems that utilize Creative Commons
licensing.
4. LEGAL SUGGESTIONS
Let’s start with a simple but fundamental logical assumption,
which is connected with the above about the underlying
mechanisms of licenses. Since for centuries the reference model
for the management of copyright has been the “all rights
reserved” model, it follows that any work in which we run into
responds to the model of full protection, whether a specific
warning is shown or not. In other words, if surfing on the web
we find a picture, text, music and we have no assurance that
the rights holder has authorized their free use in some way, we
must refrain from any operation, in orther to protect ourselves
from possible injunctions and litigation for copyright
infringement.
Consequently, moving to the perspective of the rights holder,
if we allow certain free uses of our work we should mention
explicitly and clearly, so that any user (even random) of our
work can understand our choice and can take advantage of it.
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A. THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Whether works are in digital format, or they are distributed
on a physical medium, the most banal and the most intuitive
solution is to put an appropriate notice about copyright in the
work (or inextricably linked) to specify the three essential
pieces of information: the name of the rights holder, the year of
publication of the work (i.e. the year in which the rights began
to be exercised) and the type of license applied to the work.
A correct example of copyright notice could be:
Copyright © Joseph Green 2011
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution –
Non Commercial – Share Alike 3.0 license.
The text of the license is available at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
We should not forget any of these details and include the link
correctly and completely. An inaccurate disclaimer (or a self‐
contradictory one) would undermine the function of
communicating information with any legal value.
However, we consider that, in the case of Creative Commons
licenses applied through the insertion of HTML code into web
pages (see details in the next section), a draft of copyright notice
appears at the bottom of our page. Nothing prohibits us from
enriching this brief text with more information or from
embellishing it by replacing certain words. What matters is that
the section with the link to the license remains intact and the
end result is clear and consistent with what needs to be
expressed.
B. USE OF LOGOS AND “VISUALS”
As we have seen, Creative Commons has put a lot of
emphasis on the semantic effectiveness of the visuals, that is
those small icons and buttons with which their evocative
graphics identify the licenses and other various tools of Creative
Commons. In addition to those related to individual clauses,
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 47
there is a generic one (and perhaps the most common one)
with the symbol of Creative Commons that is the double circled
C, and the sentence “some rights reserved”.
Otherwise, it is important to bear in mind that these are
elements that primarily have the purpose to embellish and
disseminate, so that users can understand and recognize more
effectively licenses and other instruments in the world of
Creative Commons. However, logos and visuals do not have a
legally‐significant value in the sense that only using one of
these visuals may not be sufficient to explain the willingness of
the licensee if they are not tied to an appropriate disclaimer or
(when possible) to a link to the text of that license.
Let’s look at the perspective of a generic user of our Creative
Commons licensed work, who, without knowing in the least
what a Creative Commons license is, gets a CD or a book that
only shows the visual information to the license or – even
worse – the generic button with the double C circled and the
words “some rights reserved”. With these general directions the
user cannot easily trace the real will of the licensor, and
therefore the function of the visual information will not be
sufficient. Instead, the issue is different if we move in the digital
and online environment; if it is a work published on the Web, a
simple button may be sufficient to inform the user when
clicking on the button the text of a disclaimer or directly the
license’s text (either the “commons deed” or “legal code”)
appears clearly and immediately.
The issue becomes even more delicate if we make some
considerations when it comes to trademark law and protection
of distinctive signs.
Indeed, as stated on the official web‐page for the policies for
using the CC trademarks, «the double C in a circle, the words and
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logotype “Creative Commons,” Creative Commons license
buttons, and any combination of the foregoing, whether
integrated into a larger whole or standing alone, are Creative
Commons’ trademarks.» 16. The purpose is to clarify that all
brands (logos, trademarks, visuals) are subject to legal
protection, and that the right holder is the Creative Commons
Corporation. The users of the tools offered by Creative
Commons can use them freely, but in strict compliance with the
policies dictated by the body.
On the use of the Creative Commons logo, the
aforementioned page dedicated to the policies explains that
«Creative Commons licenses the use of its trademarked CC logo
in the context of its Public Copyright License Marks (shown
immediately to the right) on the condition that licensee use the
mark solely to point to a Creative Commons license or
Commons deed on the Creative Commons server or otherwise
uses it to describe the Creative Commons license that applies to
a particular work; and provided that, to the extent the licensee
is using the mark in an online environment, licensee does not
alter or remove the hyperlink embedded in such logo as made
available on Creative Commons webpage» 17.
Despite Creative Commons has shown some flexibility and
tolerance in the use of its logos, we always have to keep in mind
that any unauthorized use of a mark may entail – in principle –
a legal dispute. So it is always advisable to strictly adhere to the
policies of Creative Commons. For other uses not provided in
the policies it is better to contact the project leaders to obtain
specific authorization.
16 http://creativecommons.org/policies.
17 http://creativecommons.org/policies.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 49
5. THE GUIDED PROCESS FOR CHOOSING A LICENSE
For those who have not yet acquired sufficient familiarity
with the licenses, Creative Commons has developed an
interactive process to choose and apply a license which is the
closest to the licensor’s needs: it is in the official web site at
http://creativecommons.org/choose/.
Let us observe how the screen‐shot appears at the
beginning of the guiding procedure:
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In essence, to make things simpler and more intuitive the
site presents some questions to deduce which of the six
Creative Commons licenses best serves our needs as licensors.
The first question is “Do you allow commercial uses of your
work?” and there are two possibile answers: “yes” or “no”.
The second question is “Do you allow modifications of your
work?” and offers three possible answers: “yes”, “no” and “yes,
as long as others share alike”.
Subsequently, the screen provides the option to choose the
jurisdiction. Scrolling down, all the countries of the world
(precisely, the countries where the porting of licenses has been
completed) appear. Then we can choose the most appropriate
jurisdiction, based on the criteria we have mentioned above. It
is also possible, however, not to indicate any particular
jurisdiction, leaving “none of the above” highlighted. This is
suitable for example in cases where it is not possible to make
objective assessments about which jurisdiction will be
prevalent for the life of our work, and therefore we will use an
“unported” license; it will be up to those who will analyze the
specific case (judges, lawyers, consultants) to identify the
correct jurisdiction and applicable law.
Finally, there is also a part aimed to gather some additional
information about the work through some open fields that the
licensor can fill in or leave blank.
The data that he decides to enter will later be incorporated
within the metadata constituting the digital code; of course, if
you want to make your work readily available and recognizable
you should provide as much information as possible.
The fields to be filled in relate to:
• the format of the work (audio, video, image, text,
interactive or otherwise);
• the title of the work;
• the name of the author or copyright holder that the users
of the work should state in compliance with the provision
Attribution (present in all the six licenses);
• the URL (the specific web address) that will link those who
use or redistribute the work;
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 51
• the source from which the work is extrapolated (in the
case of a work that already comes from another previously
published one);
• the exact address of the web page where the licensor can
possibly claim to allow other uses, in addition to those already
granted by the license choice.
Once you have filled in everything that you are interested in,
you can click on the “select a license” button and you will be
forwarded to the page where the license which corresponds to
your preferences is, with the following screen‐shot:
The requested license is present in the first part of the
screen‐shot and here there is one more choice to make: it is a
purely aesthetic choice, i.e. which of the three types of buttons
you prefer to show on your web page. Once you have checked
the option, click on “Watch how the license will be” then you
can see the Commons Deed as it will be seen by the users when
they view your web page.
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Looking at the Commons Deed obtained, all the elements
which we discussed in these pages can be found: the name of
the license written in full, the complete version and jurisdiction
(also highlighted by the flag information that appears at the top
right), the division license in two main parts: the first part
related to the freedom for the licensee; and the second part
related to the conditions set by the licensor with some
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 53
additional clarifications, inserted at the end of the text. Finally,
we find the link to the Legal Code form of the license.
Obviously, if you were about to publish a work on a physical
medium (such as a book, a CD or a DVD) instead of online and
you wanted to use the Commons Deed as your disclaimer, it is
highly advisable to add a statement at the end of the text
showing the full web address to which the user can find the
Legal Code. This way, if a user is not aware of Creative
Commons and he had a book, a CD or a DVD with this
Commons Deed inserted, he would be able to read and to
ascertain the conditions that you have put on the work, by
reading the full text of the license.
6. TECHNICAL SUGGESTIONS
Technical issues related to the dissemination of works under
Creative Commons licenses are complementary to each other
and can vary depending on the point of view from which we
consider them: if you are a writer or producer, it is in your
interest to ensure proper enforcement of CC licenses so that
those looking for works released with a certain type of license
can find your work more easily. However, if we are on the other
side (i.e., on the side of the user who looks for works under CC
licenses), we can do our research and selection better if the
licensor has applied the license to the work, observing all the
necessary technical precautions. As you can imagine, the
following considerations are attributable solely to works
published in digital format and disseminated through the
Internet. So they do not relate solely to works published on
material supports.
There are several ways to publish and distribute files of your
work online, some that require a certain familiarity and
awareness of internet technologies, others which are simpler
and more intuitive. Recently, with the advent of the so‐called
“web 2.0”, there are different services that offer an integrated
set of choices (webspace to host the file, more advanced tagging
and licensing processes, etc). We cannot, of course, provide a
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complete overview of all the available services with their
current mode of operation. We therefore limit our discussion to
some basic principles to clarify and analyze the most common
services, referring to other sources for further discussion of the
distinctive features.
The license choosing process we have discussed above is
intended to provide a set of metadata, identifying the license we
choose. By inserting these code lines in the HTML structure of
our website, we will see the usual copyright notice and the
button with a link to the the license’s Commons Deed at the
bottom of the page.
Therefore, if we assume we would release a movie licensed
with CC, and we already have our website, we have to do the
following: create a special webpage, insert the video file, display
the page in “code mode”, copy (by the classic “ctrl‐c” command)
the lines of metadata provided at the end of the choosing
process, paste (by the classic “ctrl‐v” command) metadata at the
end of your HTML page, before “</ body> </ html>”. This
process is based on a system known in technical terms as
Resource Description Framework (RDF) 18 and it uniformly
works for all kinds of files because it does not directly operate
on the code of the file, but on the web page that hosts the file.
A. MARKING CREATIVE COMMONS WORKS: GENERAL
ASPECTS 19
It is also recommended thatyou display the license within
the work itself, especially if your content will be shared online
18 «The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata
data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual
description or modeling of information that is implemented in web
resources, using a variety of syntax formats.» This definition is taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework.
19 This section is partially taken from the document published at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/6/61/Creativecommons‐
licensing‐and‐marking‐your‐content_eng.pdf.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 55
or displayed in a physical medium. Different types of content
will have different limitations, but your marker should contain:
1. The full URL (link) to the license.
Example: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
2. Optionally, the Creative Commons license icons,
including the CC logo.
CC icons may be downloaded from the Press Kit page at
http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads. Markers and
video bumpers are available on the CC wiki, but you can also
make your own.
You may also want to include a copyright notice stating the
author(s) and date of creation. The phrase “some rights
reserved” may be used to differentiate from the default “all
rights reserved” copyright notice.
Since each CC license represents a different set of
permissions and restrictions, it is important to note the specific
license used.
Displaying only the c icon, “Creative Commons”, or “some
rights reserved” is insufficient, always include the full URL.
In order for others to credit you for your work, it is
preferable to provide an attribution name and URL. If your work
is a derivative or remix, you must also properly attribute the
original creator(s).
Unless the creator(s) has specified otherwise, displaying his
name(s) and an URL (if applicable) is adequate attribution.
B. MARKING SPECIFIC KINDS OF FILES 20
Textbased documents should contain a CC marker – a
graphic or line of text stating the license – wherever a copyright
notice would go, such as in a footer or on a cover page. For
documents containing images, markers should ideally include
20 This section is partially taken from the document published at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/6/61/Creativecommons‐
licensing‐and‐marking‐your‐content_eng.pdf.
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the CC icons and the full URL to the license. For plain text
documents, the CC icons may be replaced with the name of the
license (e.g. Creative Commons Attribution‐Noncommercial) or
the abbreviation (e.g. CC BY‐NC). In both cases the full URL to
the license should be included. A copyright notice stating the
author(s), date, and copyright should also be included. 21
For images, a CC marker – a graphic or line of text stating
the license – should be displayed on or near the image.
Markers should ideally include the CC icons and the full URL
to the license. For plain text captions, the CC icons may be
replaced with the name of the license (e.g. Creative Commons
Attribution) or the abbreviation (e.g. CC BY). In both cases the
full URL to the license should be included. A copyright notice
stating the author(s), date, and copyright should also be
included. 22
There are a variety of ways to mark audio. One option is an
audio bumper – a brief sound clip at the beginning or end of
your audio work that states the author(s) and CC license. If you
record your own audio bumper, be sure to include the full URL
to the license and/or the full name of the license (including
version number). A copyright notice stating the author(s), date,
and copyright should also be included. 23
Example Script:
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under
[license].
© 2007, [author]. Some Rights Reserved.
21 Sample markers may be downloaded at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_markers.
22 Sample markers may be downloaded at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_markers.
23 Sample bumpers may be downloaded at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User_submitted_bumpers.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 57
Another way to mark audio is with a CC marker – a graphic
or line of text stating the license – next to the file (on a
webpage) or in the liner notes (for physical media). For more
information about CC markers, see Marking Image above.
Video should contain a video bumper – a notice at the
beginning or end of your video that states the author(s) and CC
license. If you make your own video bumper, be sure to include
the CC license icons (including the CC logo) and the full URL to
the license. The CC icons may be replaced with the name of the
license or the abbreviation. A copyright notice stating the
author(s), date, and copyright should also be included. 24
Another way to mark video is with a CC marker – a graphic
or line of text stating the license – next to the file (on a
webpage) or in the liner notes (for physical media). For more
information about CC markers, see Marking Image above.
C. PUBLISHING YOUR WORK THROUGH A SOCIAL NETWORKING
SITE OR A FILE SHARING SYSTEM 25
Social networking sites like YouTube, Flickr and MySpace
are a popular option for publishing and distributing content.
Some sites like Flickr (photo sharing), ccMixter (community
music and remix), and Scribd (document sharing) allow you to
select a license for your work from within the website itself. For
sites lacking this functionality, we recommend cutting and
pasting the HTML code generated by our license chooser
(http://creativecommons.org/license/) into the description
field so that users know that your work is CC licensed.
Finally, there is always the possibility to use file‐sharing
programs such as Emule, Morpheus, BearShare, with which we
share other types of files. Thus, we can spread our works also
putting these files in the sharing folder of our software; this way
24 Sample bumpers may be downloaded at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User_submitted_bumpers.
25 This section is partially taken from the document published at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/6/61/Creativecommons‐
licensing‐and‐marking‐your‐content_eng.pdf.
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those who are connected to the same peer‐to‐peer network
will see our files. Some of them also have a search option to
search files containing RDF metadata. 26 If we want to make it
even more visible to users that the work is licensed under
Creative Commons, we can also write it in the name of the file,
possibly using the most common abbreviations (eg “CC by‐nc‐
sa” to report a work licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike).
D. FINDING WORKS UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES
If we click “find” on the homepage of
www.creativecommons.org, we are immediately redirected to
the web‐page http://search.creativecommons.org. Here is a
page created by Creative Commons to facilitate searching for
works released under CC. In the search field you can enter one
or more keywords and even specify what you want to do with
the work, only by checking the two options on the right: 1) “I
want something that I can use for commercial purposes”; 2) “I
want something that I can modify, adapt, or build upon”.
A search initiated via this page will use Google or other
search engines that can conduct a specific search on contents
with Creative Commons licenses.
26 Metadata is machine‐readable information embedded within a digital file.
Properly formatted metadata can communicate CC license information to
your computer, MP3 player, ebook reader,etc. Some formats (such as MP3
and SVG) support license metadata better than others. Creative Commons
supports the use of XMP for embedding and retrieving standardized,
media specific metadata. More technical details at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/XMP.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 59
Finally, we can look for a more immediate way through
some versions of Mozilla Firefox, which incorporate a small
search field in the top right, next to the web address. Clicking on
the drop down (which as the default option usually gives the “G”
in Google) there is the symbol with the double C of Creative
Commons.
APPENDIX I
THE COMMONS DEEDS
OF THE LICENSES
(release 3.0, unported version)
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taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 63
taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
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taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 65
taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0
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taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 67
taken from
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
APPENDIX II
THE PAGE ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS
ON WIKIPEDIA 27
27 This appendix is a modified version of the text we found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons on August 13, 2010.
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Creative Commons (CC) is a non‐profit organization
headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States
devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for
others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has
released several copyright‐licenses known as Creative
Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses
allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and
which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other
creators. An easy to understand one‐page explanation of rights,
with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each
Creative Commons license. This simplicity distinguishes
Creative Commons from an all rights reserved copyright.
Creative Commons was invented to create a more flexible
copyright model, replacing “all rights reserved” with “some
rights reserved”. Wikipedia is one of the notable web‐based
projects using one of its licenses.
The organization was founded in 2001 by Larry Lessig, Hal
Abelson and Eric Eldred with support of the Center for the
Public Domain. The first set of copyright licenses were released
in December 2002. In 2008, there were an estimated 130
million works licensed under Creative Commons. Creative
Commons is governed by a board of directors and a technical
advisory board. Esther Wojcicki, journalism teacher from Palo
Alto, CA, is currently the chair of the board. Creative Commons
has been embraced by many as a way for content creators to
take control of how they choose to share their intellectual
property. There has also been criticism that it doesn’t go far
enough.
AIM AND INFLUENCE
Creative Commons has been described as being at the
forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the
building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to
the automatic “all rights reserved” copyright, dubbed “some
rights reserved.” David Berry and Giles Moss have credited
Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 71
intellectual property and contributing to the re‐thinking of the
role of the “commons” in the “information age”. Beyond that,
Creative Commons has provided “institutional, practical and
legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment
and communicate with culture more freely.”
Creative Commons works to counter what the organization
considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive
permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of
Creative Commons, it is “a culture in which creators get to
create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators
from the past”. 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.
GOVERNANCE
The current CEO of Creative Commons is Catherine
Casserly. Mike Linksvayer is Vice President and Diane Peters is
the General Counsel.
BOARD
The current Creative Commons Board include: Hal Abelson,
Glenn Otis Brown, Michael W. Carroll, Caterina Fake, Davis
Guggenheim, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Laurie Racine, Eric
Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Jimmy Wales, and
Esther Wojcicki (Chair).
TECHNICAL ADVISORY BOARD
The Technical Advisory Board includes five members: Hal
Abelson, Ben Adida, Barbara Fox, Don McGovern and Eric Miller.
Hal Abelson also serves on the Creative Commons Board.
AUDIT COMMITTEE
Creative Commons also has an Audit Committee, with two
members: Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Lawrence Lessig.
Both serve on the Creative Commons Board.
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TYPES OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES
There are six major licenses of the Creative Commons:
• Attribution (CC‐BY)
• Attribution – Share Alike (CC‐BY‐SA)
• Attribution – No Derivatives (CC‐BY‐ND)
• Attribution – Non Commercial (CC‐BY‐NC)
• Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike (CC‐BY‐
NC‐SA)
• Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives (CC‐
BY‐NC‐ND)
There are four major conditions of the Creative Commons:
Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author;
Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a
similar license (later or jurisdiction version); Non‐Commercial
(NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes;
and No Derivatives (ND), allowing only the original work,
without derivatives.
As of the current versions, all Creative Commons licenses
allow the “core right” to redistribute a work for non‐
commercial purposes without modification. The NC and ND
options will make a work non‐free.
Additional options include the CC0 option, or “no rights
reserved.” For software, Creative Commons has three available
licenses: the BSD License, the CC GNU LGPL license, and the CC
GNU GPL.
JURISDICTION PORTS
The original non‐localized Creative Commons licenses were
written with the U.S. legal system in mind, so the wording could
be incompatible within different local legislations and render
the licenses unenforceable in various jurisdictions. To address
this issue, Creative Commons International has started to port
the various licenses to accommodate local copyright and
private law. As of May 2010, there are 52 jurisdiction‐specific
licenses, with 9 other jurisdictions in drafting process, and
more countries joining the worldwide project.
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CRITICISM
GENERAL CRITICISM
Péter Benjamin Tóth asserts that Creative Commons’
objectives are already well served by the current copyright
regime, and that Creative Commons’ “some rights reserved”
slogan, as against Copyright’s “all rights reserved”, creates a
false dichotomy. “Copyright provides a list of exclusive rights to
the rightholder, from which he decides which ones he wishes to
“sell” or grant and which to retain. The “some rights reserved”
concept is therefore not an alternative to, but rather the very
nature of classical copyright.” Other critics fear that Creative
Commons could erode the copyright system over time.
Some of Creative Commons’ critics support revision of the
copyright act, but believe Creative Commons to be merely a
contractual quick fix that dissuades the public from mobilizing
toward a real revision of the Copyright Act and copyright term
lengths. Others, such as Jeffrey Harrison, believe the Creative
Commons system to be too lax, and caution against “allowing
some of our most precious resources – the creativity of
individuals – to be simply tossed into the commons to be
exploited by whomever has spare time and a magic marker.”
Other critics question whether Creative Commons licenses
are truly useful for artists, suggesting that Creative Commons is
directed mainly toward a “remix culture” that often fails to
account for the real needs, such as financial compensation and
recognition, of fine artists, especially in the visual arts world.
Some critics also worry that a system that does not allow
authors to obtain a reward for their creations will cause some
artists to avoid sharing their work.
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig counters that
copyright laws have not always offered the strong and
seemingly indefinite protection that today’s law provides.
Rather, copyright’s duration used to be limited to much shorter
terms of years, and some works never gained protection
because they did not follow the now‐abandoned compulsory
format.
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Another critic questions whether Creative Commons can
really be the commons that it purports to be, given that at least
some restrictions apply to people’s ability to use the resources
within the common field. The is restricted entirely within the
private rights of others and has nothing to do with rights shared
by all. Creative Commons also does not define “creativity” or
what aspects a work requires in order to become part of the
commons.
Critics such as David Berry and Giles Moss also argue that
the founding of Creative Commons is not the proper
mechanism for creating a commons of original content. Rather,
a commons should be created, and its presence preserved,
through the political process and political activism, not through
lawyers writing down new rules.
LICENSE PROLIFERATION AND INCOMPATIBILITY
Critics have also argued that Creative Commons worsens
license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are
incompatible. The Creative Commons website states, “Since
each of the six CC licenses functions differently, resources
placed under different licenses may not necessarily be
combined with one another without violating the license
terms.” Works licensed under incompatible licenses may not be
recombined in a derivative work without obtaining permission
from the license‐holder. Some worry that “without a common
legal framework, works which inadvertently mix licenses may
become unshareable.”
LICENSE MISUSE
Some copyright holders have complained that internet users
erroneously brand their copyrighted works with Creative
Commons licenses, then re‐upload the works to the internet.
Critics assert that this stems from rampant user‐confusion
about the licenses. At present, there are no checks in place to
hold users accountable for mislicensing.
Although Creative Commons offers multiple licenses for
different uses, some critics suggest that the licenses still do not
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 75
address the differences among the media or among the various
concerns that different authors have. For example, one critic
points out that documentary filmmakers could have vastly
different concerns from those held by a software designer or a
law professor. Additionally, people wishing to use a Creative
Commons‐licensed work would have to determine if their
particular use is allowed under the license or if they need
additional permission.
Lessig wrote that the point of Creative Commons is to
provide a middle ground between two extreme views of
copyright protection–one demanding that all rights be
controlled, and the other arguing that none should be controlled.
Creative Commons provides a third option that allows authors
to pick and choose which rights they want to control and which
they want to relinquish. The multitude of licenses reflects the
multitude of rights that can be passed on to subsequent
creators.
THE FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION
Some Creative Commons licenses do not meet the standards
of the Free Software Foundation and other free content
organizations. Specifically, the Creative Commons NC license
has been denounced by FSF founder Richard Stallman because,
he says, it denies users a “basic freedom” to reuse materials as
they see fit.
Mako Hill asserts that Creative Commons fails to establish a
“base level of freedom” that all Creative Commons licenses must
meet, and with which all licensors and users must comply. “By
failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the
sand, CC is a missed opportunity.... CC has replaced what could
have been a call for a world where ‘essential rights are
unreservable’ with the relatively hollow call for ‘some rights
reserved.’” Some critics fear that Creative Commons’ popularity
may detract from the more stringent goals of other free content
organizations.
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OTHER CRITICISMS OF THE NON‐COMMERCIAL LICENSE
Other critics, such as Erik Moeller, raise concerns about the
use of Creative Commons’ non‐commercial license. Works
distributed under the Creative Commons Non‐Commercial
license are not compatible with many open‐content sites,
including Wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage
some commercial uses. Moller explains that “the people who
are likely to be hurt by an ‐NC license are not large
corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising‐
funded radio stations, or local newspapers.”
Lessig responds that the current copyright regime also
harms compatibility and that authors can lessen this
incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license.
Additionally, the non‐commercial license is useful for
preventing someone else from capitalizing on an author’s work
when the author still plans to do so in the future.
DEBIAN
The maintainers of Debian, a GNU and Linux distribution
known for its rigid adherence to a particular definition of
software freedom, do not believe that even the Creative
Commons Attribution License, the least restrictive of the
licenses, adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(DFSG) due to the license’s anti‐DRM provisions (which could
restrict private redistribution to some extent) and its
requirement in section 4a that downstream users remove an
author’s credit upon request from the author.
As the other licenses are identical to the Creative Commons
Attribution License with further restrictions, Debian considers
them non‐free for the same reasons. There have been efforts to
remove these problems in the new version 3.0 licenses, so they
can be compatible with the DFSG. In contrast to the CC‐SA 2.0
license, version 3.0 is considered to be compatible to the DFSG.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 77
LEGAL CASES
DUTCH TABLOID
A Creative Commons license was first tested in court in
early 2006, when podcaster Adam Curry sued a Dutch tabloid
who published photos without permission from his Flickr page.
The photos were licensed under the Creative Commons Non‐
Commercial license. While the verdict was in favor of Curry, the
tabloid avoided having to pay restitution to him as long as they
did not repeat the offense. An analysis of the decision states,
“The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it
confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license
automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind
users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or
having knowledge of, the conditions of the license.”
VIRGIN MOBILE
In 2007, Virgin Mobile launched a bus stop ad campaign
promoting their cellphone text messaging service using the
work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to
Flickr using a Creative Commons‐BY (Attribution) license.
Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use
by any other entity, as long as the original creator was
attributed credit, without any other compensation required.
Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL leading to
the photographer’s Flickr page on each of their ads. However,
one picture, depicting 15 year‐old Alison Chang at a fund‐raising
carwash for her church, caused some controversy when she
sued Virgin Mobile. The photo was taken by Alison’s church
youth counselor, Justin Ho‐Wee Wong, who uploaded the image
to Flickr under the Creative Commons license. In 2008, the case
was thrown out of court for lack of jurisdiction.
CC‐MUSIC – SPANISH COURT (2006)
The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was
enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in
Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC‐licensed
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music. In this case, the main Spanish collecting society –
Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) sued a disco
owner for the public performance of music managed by the
collecting society. However, the Lower Court rejected the
collecting society’s claims because the owner of the bar proved
that the music he was using was not managed by the society,
since it was under CC licence.
APPENDIX III
HOW TO PUBLISH 28
28 This appendix is a modified version of the text we found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons on August 13, 2010.
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Audio
Specific Sites
Internet Archive
You can quickly and easily publish your audio files to the
Internet Archive by visiting http://www.archive.org/create/, which
includes a license selection step.
For large files (>500MB), you may wish to use our CC Publisher
application. CC Publisher is a tool that does two things: it will help
you tag your audio files with information about your license and it
allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video
works to the Internet Archive for free hosting.
CC Publisher is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
operating systems. Download links and installation instructions can
be found on the CC Publisher page.
Using CC Publisher
Step one: Dragging your songs into CC Publisher
Start the CC Publisher application and hit Next on the introductory
screen. The process starts by adding your files to be
tagged/uploaded. You can use the browse function to find the files,
or simply drag and drop as many files that you would like to license
(all with the same license) and upload (all into the same collection
at Internet Archive).
Step two: Adding information about your works
The next screen will ask for information about your recording or
video, which will help others find it at the archive and build up the
metadata in your audio files
Step three: Choose your license
CC Publisher lets you choose one of several license types and the
options for each.
Step four: Logging into the Internet Archive
To upload your works to the Internet Archive, you'll need an
account there to associate your files with. If you don't have an
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 81
account there, there is a handy button within CC Publisher that will
launch a web browser and allow you to join it.
Step five: Start your upload to the Archive
The final step is to upload your works to the Internet Archive.
Depending on your connection and the size of files you are
uploading, this step can take anywhere from a few seconds to
several hours.
Step six: All done!
When your upload is complete, the Publisher application will furnish
you with a URL that should be live within 24 hours at the Archive.
Soundclick
Step one: Sign up at SoundClick
SoundClick is a music website that features both signed and
unsigned bands, offering unlimited storage for your band's music.
The easiest way to post music online with a Creative Commons
license is to let SoundClick handle all the hosting, posting, and
licensing for you. Start by signing up a new (free) account at
SoundClick.
Step two: Add information about your band
SoundClick offers plenty of ways for you to add additional
information about your music. Describing your band and the type of
music you play will help visitors find your music.
Step three: Upload your song to Soundclick
After adding information about your song, upload it to SoundClick.
Step four: Choose your license at SoundClick
The last step is to apply a license for your uploaded song. Be sure
to click the "Yes" option under the first question, to enable the
license options for your song.
View your license at SoundClick
Once your song has been uploaded and licensed, go to your
SoundClick music page, and you should see a "license" link for
each song uploaded, which should link to the license you chose.
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Morpheus
Morpheus is a popular windows P2P file-sharing
application with support for locating and displaying Creative
Commons licenses on audio files. The following steps describe the
process to distributing your audio on the Morpheus network.
Step one: Use CC Publisher to add metadata to your music
The first step to getting your music recognized by
Morpheus is to embed your license into your songs. Follow our
tutorial on using CC Publisher. When you're done either publishing
your song to the Internet Archive or your own website, your audio
file will have the proper embedded metadata.
Step two: Put your song into Morpheus' Downloads
directory
Once you have used CC Publisher, your audio file should
have extra metadata embedded. Simply copy the file to your
Downloads directory within Morpheus to begin sharing it. Others
using the Morpheus client should be able to see your song and
search for it.
Finding Creative Commons licensed audio on Morpheus
Search for licensed music at Morpheus
You can search for licensed songs at Morpheus by putting
"cc:sampling" into the search field (search for other licenses via
"cc:sharing" is coming soon).
Licenses in Search Results
You should see Creative Commons license information in
your search results.
View license information in your results
Mousing over individual results will also display any
Creative Commons license information. When downloading
licensed songs, you may want to verify the files with CC Lookup.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 83
Adding a license to your audio page
Step one: Choose a license
If you already have your own website hosting your music
and you'd like to put others on notice that they can use and share
your songs, start by choosing a license for your work.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Step three: Paste code into your site
The specifics of the last step will depend on how you edit
your website. Most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, or GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code
that makes up your page. Near the end of the page you are hosting
music, before you see </body></html>, paste in the code copied in
the previous step by clicking the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v
on a Mac).
Video
Internet Archive
You can quickly and easily publish your video files to the
Internet Archive using our CC Publisher application. CC Publisher
is a tool that does two things: it will help you tag your video files
with information about your license and it allows you to upload
Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet
Archive for free hosting.
CC Publisher is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating
systems. Download links and installation instructions can be found on the
CC Publisher page.
Using CC Publisher
Step one: Dragging your video into CC Publisher
Start the CC Publisher application and hit Next on the
introductory screen. The process starts by adding your files to be
tagged/uploaded. You can use the browse function to find the files,
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or simply drag and drop as many files that you would like to license
(all with the same license) and upload (all into the same collection
at Internet Archive).
Step two: Adding information about your works
The next screen will ask for information about your
recording or video, which will help others find it at the archive and
build up the metadata in your audio/video files.
Step three: Choose your license
CC Publisher lets you choose one of several license types
and the options for each.
Step four: Logging into the Internet Archive
To upload your works to the Internet Archive, you'll need
an account there to associate your files with. If you don't have an
account there, there is a handy button within CC Publisher that will
launch a web browser and allow you to join it.
Step five: Start your upload to the Archive
The final step is to upload your works to the Internet
Archive. Depending on your connection and the size of files you are
uploading, this step can take anywhere from a few seconds to
several hours.
Step six: All done!
When your upload is complete, the Publisher application
will furnish you with a URL that should be live within 24 hours at the
Archive.
Adding a license to your video page
Step one: Choose a license
If you already have your own website hosting your video
and you'd like to put others on notice that they can use and share
your songs, start by choosing a license for your work.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 85
Step three: Paste code into your site
The specifics of the last step will depend on how you edit
your website. Most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, or GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code
that makes up your page. Near the end of the page you are hosting
music, before you see </body></html>, paste in the code copied in
the previous step by clicking the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v
on a Mac).
Image
Flickr
Step one: Sign up at Flickr
Flickr is an online photo sharing service that offers
Creative Commons licenses on your photos. The easiest way to
post images online with a Creative Commons license is to let Flickr
handle all the hosting, posting, and licensing for you. Start by
signing up a new (free) account at Flickr.
Step two: Upload your images to Flickr
Flickr offers a variety of upload tools that work within
several popular programs, but the easiest way is to upload them
directly through their website.
Step three: Choose a license at Flickr
The last step is to apply a license for all your uploaded
photos.
Buzznet
Step one: Sign up at Buzznet
Buzznet is photo hosting service offering Creative
Commons licenses for your photos. The easiest way to post
images online with a Creative Commons license is to let Buzznet
handle all the hosting, posting, and licensing for you. Start by
signing up a new (free) account at Buzznet.
Step two: Upload your images to Buzznet
Buzznet lets you upload images directly through their
website. Clicking "Post" will take you to the upload page.
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Step three: Choose a license at Buzznet
The last step is to apply a license for all your uploaded
photos, using the license wizard at Buzznet. Clicking "Dashboard"
will take you to the license choosing page, then click "Change
default License" to start the wizard.
Adding a license to your photo pages
Step one: Choose a license
If you already have your own website hosting your photos
and you'd like to put others on notice that they can use and share
your images, start by choosing a license for your work.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Step three: Paste code into your site
The specifics of the last step will depend on how you edit your
website. Most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or
GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code that makes up your
page. Near the end of the page you are hosting music, before you see
</body></html>, paste in the code copied in the previous step by clicking
the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v on a Mac). If you use custom photo
gallery software to display your images, try pasting the code into the "footer"
file in your site, or the section of the gallery that controls what the bottom of
pages look like.
Text
Blog
Adding a license to your Movable Type Weblog
Step one: Login to Movable Type
You'll want to start by logging into your Movable Type
installation, and finding the "Edit Configuration" link for the blog
you'd like to license.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 87
Step two: Edit Configuration/Choose license
On the main configuration page, click on the "Preferences"
option in the upper right area, then scroll down to the link marked
"Create a License now" link. Answer the questions, scroll down to
save your configuration, then republish your blog to see a license
button added to your site.
Adding a license to Blogger/Blogspot
Step one: Choose a license
Start by choosing a license for your work at the Creative
Commons website.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Step three: Paste code into your Blogger Template
Log into the Dashboard of your Blogger blog, click
"Layout" then "Edit HTML". Near the end of the template code,
before you see </body></html>, paste in the code copied in the
previous step by clicking the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v on
a Mac).
Click "Save Template Changes" then republish your blog
to add your license to your Blogger site.
Adding a license to Typepad
(Follow the first two steps above to choose a license and copy
the code)
Step three: Create a new Typelist
You'll want to create a new Typelist to hold the Creative
Commons license code. Log into Typepad, then click on the
Typelists tab, and create a new Typelist called CC or Creative
Commons, and make it a Link type of list.
Step four: Paste code into your new Typelist
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Click "New Item" to add a Typelist item, and paste your
license code into the "Notes" area and save the item.
Step five: Change Typelist configuration
Once the item is saved in your new Typelist, click the "Edit
Configuration" link for your Creative Commons typelist, then scroll
down to the Advanced options, and under "Display Notes" click the
"as text" option and save.
Step six: Add Typelist to your blog
The last step is to add the typelist to your blog. Click the
"Edit Design" option on your blog, then click the "Content" link and
scroll down to the Typelists options, then click your Creative
Commons typelist, save, then republish your blog to add the
license.
Adding a license to LiveJournal
(Follow the first two steps above to choose a license and copy
the code)
While logged in, go to the LiveJournal homepage and look at the
header.
• If it's a personal blog, choose "Journal" then "Journal
style".
• If it's a community, choose "Communities" then
"Manage," and for the community you want to mark,
click "[Journal Style]" on the right.
On the right, under "(blog name)'s current theme", click
"Customize your theme".
Click Sidebar and paste the HTML code into the relevant
box. (Depending on the theme, you may need to click "sidebar"
there may be one or many boxes, and you may need to click "Free
Text Sidebox" to make them visible.)
Save and see how it looks.
Depending on the options you've chosen, this may look a bit
bulky or messy - you may want to add <small> </small> tags to the
text under the box.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 89
Depending on the theme you are using, you may be able to add
the mark elsewhere, e.g. in a footer (?).
Another option is to edit the CSS directly, if you know how to do
this. Instead of clicking "Sidebar", click "Custom CSS" and go from
there. LiveJournal's way of selectively presenting the CSS {?)
differs from other blog platforms, so this can be confusing if you're
not used to it. Make a copy of the previous version of the CSS into
a text file, and note the settings, in case something goes wrong and
you need to change it back.
Adding a license to your existing website
Step one: Choose a license
If you already have your own website hosting your text,
essays and writings and you'd like to put others on notice that they
can use and share your text, start by choosing a license for your
work.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Step three: Paste code into your site
The specifics of the last step will depend on how you edit
your website. Most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, or GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code
that makes up your page. Near the end of the page you are hosting
music, before you see </body></html>, paste in the code copied in
the previous step by clicking the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v
on a Mac).
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Education
Adding a license to your existing website
Step one: Choose a license
If you already have your own website hosting your
educational materials and you'd like to put others on notice that
they can use and share your materials, start by choosing a license
for your work.
Step two: Copy the code
On the "Mark your content" page of the license process,
copy the code provided by highlighting it with your mouse and
hitting ctrl-c (command-c on a Mac).
Step three: Paste code into your site
The specifics of the last step will depend on how you edit
your website. Most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver,
Frontpage, or GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code
that makes up your page. Near the end of the page you are hosting
music, before you see </body></html>, paste in the code copied in
the previous step by clicking the page and hitting ctrl-v (command-v
on a Mac).
APPENDIX IV
A CC REL GUIDE
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Foreward
This resource assumes some basic knowledge of HTML and
RDFa. Many of the later examples build on ideas from previous
examples. If there is something in an example that isn't explained,
check previous examples for an explanation.
Validating your RDFa can help you catch syntax errors or other
problems with your metadata. For more information on RDFa
29
validation, see the How-tovalidate page on the RDFa wiki.
This resource contains material adapted from “ccREL: The
30
Creative Commons Rights Expression Language” by Creative
Commons, which is available under a Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Basic Marking: One page, One License
A very common use of Creative Commons licenses is to license
a page on the web and the content contained within under a CC
license. For example, many blogs are licensed under a Creative
Commons license. It's common for these sites to include CC
license information at the bottom of every page in a footer, similar
to how people often include copyright ownership year and
information at the end of a page.
Below are examples of how you would indicate that a single
page on the web is licensed under CC. This is useful when
integrating a CC license mark into a footer of a website.
License metadata
This page, by <a
href="http://lessig.org/">Lawrence Lessig</a>, is
licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>.
29 http://rdfa.info/wiki/How‐to‐validate
30 http://creativecommons.org/projects/ccrel
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 93
Explanation
This is a very basic example of how to include license metadata
in HTML documents. The only metadata is provided by the
rel="license" attribute in the a tag.rel="license"
generates a triple with predicate xhtml:license. The triple relates the
current document URI to the URI of the CC BY license to the URI
for the xhtml:license predicate
(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#license).
How does this all occur by simply adding a single
rel="license" attribute xhtml is the default prefix for
reserved XHTML values, including license, which means that you
don't need to do anything special to use it (like define the xhtml
namespace). It is a built-in rel type. And the object of
the rel="license" attribute is just set by the URL in the
href attribute, which is true for all rel attributes.
License metadata with license image
<a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.p
ng" /> </a> <br /> This page, by <a
href="http://lessig.org/">Lawrence Lessig</a>, is
licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>.
Explanation
You can add rel="license" to any tag with a valid href
attribute. This means that for links to the license, anything can be
between the a tags, including an image of the license mark.
In this example, the CC BY license mark is a link, with
rel="license" metadata, to the license deed.
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Attribution metadata
<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"> <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.p
ng" /> </a> <br /> This page, by <a
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://lessig.org/">Lawrence Lessig</a>, is
licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>. </div>
Explanation
This example shows how to include CC REL metadata into your
HTML. This metadata is what enables the CC license deeds to give
users copy-and-paste attribution HTML. To see an example of how
the CC license deeds use this metadata, go to the example HTML
and click on the license badge.
• xmlns:cc associates the prefix cc with the URL
http://creativecommons.org/ns# throughout the
div. This is critical for valid RDFa.
• property generates a new triple with predicate
cc:attributionName, and the text content of the
element, in this case Lawrence Lessig, as the object.
Note that the line does not break after the end of the
opening a tag surrounding Lawrence Lessig. In the
most recent draft of the RDFa specification, the text linked
to by the a tag (the literal) would be processed to include
any whitespaces within the a tag, including line breaks.
Whitespace is not stripped from literals by RDFa
processors that conform to the specification. When
publishing RDFa it is important to remember this; that
when parsed for RDFa, the format of your HTML could
change the value of a literal to something other than what
you might have expected.
• rel="cc:attributionURL" generates a new triple with
predicate cc:attributionURL, and the URL in the
href as the object. The attribution URL is important when
you want to indicate what URL re-users of your CC-
licensed work should link to when they attribute your work.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 95
This URL should appear in the license deed when
someone clicks on your link to the CC license.
More metadata: Title, type, and subjects.
<div about="" typeof="cc:Work"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.p
ng" /> </a> <br /> <span property="dct:title">The
Lessig Blog</span>, a <span rel="dct:type"
href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text">
collection of texts </span> by <a
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://lessig.org/">Lawrence Lessig</a>, is
licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>. </div>
Explanation
Here build on the previous example to include new metadata:
• about defines the subject of all triples within the div.
Here we have about="", which defines the subject to be
the URL of the current document. When making assertions
about the current document, or current URL, you do not
need to specify that about="". It is included here for
completeness.
• typeof="cc:Work" indicates that the current resource
has the class of cc:Work, which in the
http://creativecommons.org/ns# namespace is
described as "a potentially copyrightable work".
• In addition to the cc namespace declaration
(xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"),
we declare the Dublin Core Terms namespace
(xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"). This
puts many more terms at our disposal.
• Because we've declared the dct namespace, we can use
terms like dct:title. We've embedded it in a span with
the property attribute. The object of this assertion (that
the current document has a dct:title) would be
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the literal between the span tags. In this case, the literal
is The Lessig Blog. As noted above: Be careful not to
include unnecessary whitespace in your literals, as this
would change the assertion you are making.
Individual objects on a page
Text block
Block of text, with license and attribution metadata
<div> This text is not marked as CC licensed.
</div> <div about="#uniqueID" id="uniqueID"> This
text is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>. </div>
Explanation
When embedding RDFa metadata into HTML, you aren't limited
to making statements about the current URL. With
the about attribute, you can set the subject of your triples to any
arbitrary URI. In this example, we've set about="#uniqueID",
which means that any RDFa within the div that has
the about="#uniqueID" will have the HTML tag
with id="uniqueID" as its subject. In this example, we have
indicated that the div with id="uniqueID" is has
a rel="license" ofhttp://creativecommons.org/licens
es/by/3.0/.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 97
Images
Image with license, attribution, and work metadata
<div about="CC_image.png"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"> <img
src="CC_image.png" height="200px" /> <br /> This
image, entitled <span property="dct:title">Sharing
Creative Works</span>, by <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL dct:creator">Creative
Commons</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License</a>. </div>
Explanation
This example builds on previous examples. As in the text block
example, we make the license assertion about the image. In the
surrounding div, we place an about attribute. This scopes all
RDFa within the div as having (in this case) CC_image.png as
its subject. Thus the rel="license" statement is about the
image URL and not about the current URL, as would be the case if
we did not include the about attribute.
We have included some new metadata in this example as well.
Each property has the image file as its subject due having specified
about="CC_image.png":
• property="dct:title" within the spanelement
makes the assertion that the image file has a dct:title
of Sharing Creative Works. Note that the title is an
RDFa literal, meaning the object of the dct:title
property is whatever falls within the span tag. Therefore,
be careful not to include line breaks or other characters
that you don't want to be a part of your assertion.
• rel="cc:attributionURL dct:creator" is a
compound rel attribute. Rather than using two separate
rel attributes, we are able to place two attribute values
within a single rel by separating the properties with a
space. The rel attribute always has the href attribute
as its object, which in this case is the URL to the Creative
Commons main page, http://creativecommons.org/.
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Video
HTML5 video with one source tag and metadata
<div
about="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingim
ages/webm/ASharedCulture_240p.webm"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <video
width="426" height="240" preload="none" controls>
<source
src="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimag
es/webm/ASharedCulture_240p.webm"
type='video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"'> </video>
<br /> <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-
culture" property="dct:title"
rel="cc:attributionURL">A Shared Culture</a>, by
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="dct:creator">Jesse Dylan</a>, is licensed
under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/"> Creative Commons Attribution
NonCommercial ShareAlike License</a>. </div>
Explanation
Embedding CC REL metadata in an HTML5 video tag with a
singlesource tag is straightforward. The technique is similar to
embedding metadata about an image. An aboutattribute is used in
a surrounding div to set the subject of all triples in the div to the
URL of the video linked to by thesource tag.
Below the video, we've included a fairly standard CC license
mark. As per the instruction on the video's official page, we have
linked to the video page and attributed the video to its creator.
Additionally, we have indicated the creator of the video with
dct:creator with the object as Jesse Dylan's Wikipedia page.
The text within that link is also used as a literal to set the object of
cc:attributionName, Jesse Dylan.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 99
HTML5 video with multiple source tags(EXPERIMENTAL)
<div
about="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingim
ages/webm/ASharedCulture_240p.webm"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <video
width="426" height="240" preload="none" controls>
<source
src="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimag
es/webm/ASharedCulture_240p.webm"
type='video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"'> <source
src="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimag
es/ASharedCulture_240p.mp4" type='video/mp4;
codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"'> <source
src="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimag
es/ASharedCulture_240p.ogv" type='video/ogg;
codecs="theora, vorbis"'> </video> <br /> <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-
culture" property="dct:title"
rel="cc:attributionURL">A Shared Culture</a>, by
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="dct:creator">Jesse Dylan</a>, is licensed
under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/"> Creative Commons Attribution
NonCommercial ShareAlike License</a>. <div
about="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingim
ages/ASharedCulture_240p.mp4" property="dct:title"
content="A Shared Culture" style="display:none;">
<span property="cc:attributionName"
rel="dct:creator"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan"
content="Jesse Dylan"> </span> <span
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-
culture"> </span> <span rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/"> </span> </div> <div
about="http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingim
ages/ASharedCulture_240p.ogv" property="dct:title"
content="A Shared Culture" style="display:none;">
<span property="cc:attributionName"
rel="dct:creator"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan"
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content="Jesse Dylan"> </span> <span
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-
culture"> </span> <span rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/"> </span> </div> </div>
Explanation
For HTML5 videos with multiple source tags, our markup is
more complicated. Depending on a user's browser, a different video
could be displayed when they visit the page. Each version of the
video has equivalent content but a different URL. In this example,
we have .web, .mp4, and .ogv videos. Thus, to accommodate
this fact, we make several sets of assertions, each identical but
with a different subject.
In our example, we make one visible assertion about the first
source URL, the webmvideo. The whole example is contained in a
single div with the about attribute set to the URL to the webm
video. The license metadata, not being re-scoped in any way, then
has the subject of the webm video. Then, below the standard
license assertion, we have two div elements, each hidden from
view with a display:none; CSS rule. They are each scoped to
a different video URL than the container div. Within both hidden
divtags are the dct:title attributes. Rather than setting the
object of property="dct:title" with content between the
span tags, we use the contentattribute to set the object of
dct:title to A Shared Culture, the title of the video.
Within that hidden div are three span tags that sets first both
the dct:creator property and the cc:attributionName
property, the cc:attributionURL property, and the
rel="license" attribute. These three span tags are empty, so
for the properties that take literals, i.e.
property="cc:attributionName", we set the object of the
property with a content attribute. In this example, we set the
object of property="cc:attributionName" to Jesse Dylan
with content="Jesse Dylan".
We duplicate the hidden div tag but with a different about
attribute to make the same assertions about all three formats of the
same video.
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 101
Non-HTML5 video
<div about="http://blip.tv/play/gpxSyZQBAg"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <embed
src="http://blip.tv/play/gpxSyZQBAg"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480"
height="300" allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"> </embed> <br /> <a
property="dct:title" rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://creativecommons.org/videos/a-shared-
culture">A Shared Culture</a>, by <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="dct:creator">Jesse Dylan</a>, is licensed
under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/3.0/"> Creative Commons Attribution
NonCommercial ShareAlike License</a>. </div>
Explanation
Providing CC license metadata for non-HTML5 videos, typically
embedded as Flash objects, is similar to our image example, or the
single-source HTML5 example. We have a single URL to the video,
which we set as the subject of our statements with an
aboutattribute in the surrounding div. The URL is the same URL
in the embed tag's src attribute.
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Datasets
CC BY dataset, with license and attribution metadata
<div about="example_dataset.csv"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <a
href="example_dataset.csv">Download Example
Dataset</a> <br /> <span
property="dct:title">Example Dataset</span> was
published by <a href="http://creativecommons.org/"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL dct:publisher">Creative
Commons</a> and is licensed under a <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution License</a>. </div>
Explanation
Providing CC license data about a downloadable dataset is as
easy as marking up an image or block of text. For datasets that
have a URL, you can simply scope your statements with an about
attribute so that your metadata has the subject of your dataset's
URL.
In this example, we set about="example_dataset.csv" so
that the subsequent metadata is about the actual dataset.
One thing to note is that here we've used a compound rel
attribute with rel="cc:attributionURL dct:publisher" to
set both the cc:attributionURL and dct:publisher with
the same href attribute.
CC0 dataset, with license and attribution metadata
<div about="example_dataset.csv"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:vcard="http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-
rdf/3.0#"> <a href="example_dataset.csv">Download
Example Dataset</a> <br />x <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero
/1.0/"> <img
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 103
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/zero/1.0/88x31
.png" style="border-style: none;" alt="CC0"/> </a>
<br/> To the extent possible under law, <a
rel="dct:publisher"
href="http://creativecommons.org/"> <span
property="dct:title">Creative Commons</span></a>
has waived all copyright and related or
neighboring rights to <span
property="dct:title">Example Dataset</span> and
expects that users will follow the <a
rel="cc:useGuidelines" href=""> Creative Commons
Example Use Guidelines</a>. This work is published
from the <span property="vcard:Country"
datatype="dct:ISO3166" content="US"
about="http://creativecommons.org/">United
States</span>. </div>
Explanation
One can mark a downloadable dataset as having been placed
in the public domain with the CC0 waiver. You can create valid CC0
markup using the CC0 tool.
As with the previous example, we set the subject of our
metadata with an about attribute, setting it to the dataset file (in
this case example_dataset.csv). We must also declare the
vcard namespace, as it allows us to make statements about the
country of the publisher, which is important information for public
domain content.
We can use rel="license" to indicate that copyright has
been licensed (or in this case, waived) using the CC0 waiver (by
setting the href attribute to the URL of the waiver,
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
Additionally, we must set a dct:publisher for the dataset.
This will tell us who is publishing it, and will allow us to determine
the relevant jurisdiction for the dataset's copyright status. In this
example, the publisher is set to
http://creativecommons.org/. At the end of the example,
you'll see that we've indicated http://creativecommons.org/
has vcard:country with content="US". While one could use
the content between the span elements as the literal value for
vcard:Country, the CC0 and Public Domain Mark deeds require
a literal value with a datatype="ISO3166". That is, you don't
need to specify acontent attribute if your literal value is already
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has that datatype (if US was between the span, rather than
United States, for example). We additionally indicate that this
data, content="US" hasdatatype="dct:ISO3166".
Lastly, we've indicated Use Guidelines to this work by using the
cc:useGuidelines predicate in a rel attribute. In this
example, the object href is empty because we have not created
an example use guidelines document, but in practice this link would
point to actual use guidelines for the work. For more information,
see this CC wiki page. Please note that use guidelines are not
legally binding, and cc:useGuidelines is not meant to specify a
URL that indicates legally binding guidelines for the work.
Multiple CC Licenses on a Page
Multiple CC objects: Text and Image
<div xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"> <div
about="CC_image.png"> <img src="CC_image.png"
height="200px" /> <br /> <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.p
ng" /> </a> <br /> <span
property="dct:title">Sharing Creative
Works</span>, by <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL dct:creator">Creative
Commons</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License</a>. </div> <br /> <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/"> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-
sa/3.0/88x31.png" /> </a> <br /> This page, by <a
rel="cc:attributionURL dct:creator"
property="cc:attributionName"
href="http://creativecommons.org/foobar">Foo
Bar</a>, is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/"> Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported License</a>. </div>
Explanation
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 105
We have already seen the strategy for including metadata about
different objects on a page in the text block and other examples.
The general idea is to set different subjects for different sets of
metadata with an about attribute in a surrounding element, like a
div. In this example, we have two different license assertions. One
assertion is made about the whole document, and one is made
about the CC_image.png image. The license assertion about the
page follows the standard attribution example. All metadata is about
the current document because no aboutattribute is set to scope
the statements. Then, above that metadata, we have a div that
sets the subject CC_image.png with an about attribute. Within
that div is license metadata about the license applied to that
image.
There are two license assertions in this example. One is about
the example as a whole, and one about the image within the
example. If you were to click the license deeds from the example,
the CC license deed would see and display metadata from that
work on the page and in the copy-and-paste attribution HTML. This
is because the license assertions are made about different
licenses; for the resource as a whole, CC BY-SA, and for the
image, CC BY. Unfortunately, if both license assertions were the
same, the CC license deed would not be able to determine which
metadata to display and would therefore display none.
Attributing Reuses
Attributing a single-source remix
<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.p
ng" /> </a> <br /> Este remix del <a
href="attribution.html" rel="dct:source"> <span
property="dct:title">Attribution
Example</span></a> de <a about="attribution.html"
href="http://lessig.org/" rel="dct:creator"> <span
property="dct:title">Lawrence Lessig</span></a>,
es por <a property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative
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Commons</a> y está disponible bajo una licencia <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a>.
</div>
Explanation
Attributing a source work in a remix is similar to how you would
attribute a CC license work in a use, with one addition: you indicate
a source work for the current document using dct:source. In this
example, we have a Spanish version of an earlier example. The
original document is indicated as the source of the current URL by
linking to the source, href="attribution.html", and
specifying rel="dct:source". The title of the source document
is set in the span within the link. Here it's important to note that
dct:title is describing the object of the surrounding tag; in this
case, attribution.html. We also properly attribute the original
document with the correct cc:attributionURL and
cc:attributionName specified by the source. Lastly, we set a
new cc:attributionURL and cc:attributionName for the
remixed work.
Attributing a multiple-source remix
<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <div
about="CC_image.png"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"> <img
src="CC_image.png" height="200px" /> <br /> <span
property="dct:title">Sharing Creative
Works</span>, by <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL dct:creator">Creative
Commons</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License</a>. </div> <br /> Este remix de <a
href="attribution.html" rel="dct:source"> <span
property="dct:title">Attribution
Example</span></a>, de <a about="attribution.html"
rel="dct:creator"
href="http://lessig.org/">Lawrence Lessig</a>, y
<a href="image.html" rel="dct:source"> <span
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 107
property="dct:title">Image Example</span></a>, por
<a about="image.html" rel="dct:creator"
href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative
Commons</a>, fue creado por <a
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL"
href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative
Commons</a> y está disponible bajo una <a
rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License</a>. </div>
Explanation
To attribute multiple sources in a remixed document, you simply need to
indicate multiple dct:source documents. In this example, we have a
document that is a remix of two source documents. Both source documents
have been marked as being a dct:source. Additionally, the source
documents are properly attributed and linked to as prescribed within each.
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Public Domain Content
CC0
Marking waiver, publisher, and use guidelines
<div xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:vcard="http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-
rdf/3.0#"> <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero
/1.0/"> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/zero/1.0/88x31
.png" style="border-style: none;" alt="CC0"/> </a>
<br/> To the extent possible under law, <a
rel="dct:publisher"
href="http://creativecommons.org/"> <span
property="dct:title">Creative Commons</span></a>
has waived all copyright and related or
neighboring rights to <span
property="dct:title">Example Work</span> and
expects that users will follow the <a
rel="cc:useGuidelines" href=""> Creative Commons
Example Use Guidelines</a>. This work is published
from the <span property="vcard:Country"
datatype="dct:ISO3166" content="US"
about="http://creativecommons.org/">United
States</span>. </div>
Explanation
To mark a work as having been placed into the public domain
with the CC0 waiver, one follows similar steps from previous
examples. If you'd like to avoid manually embedding metadata, You
can create valid CC0 markup using the CC0 tool.
The link to the CC0 waiver should include a rel="license"
attribute, even though the CC0 waiver is not a license, legally
speaking. The dct:publisher should be set to the identifying
URL of the publishing entity.
As in our dataset example, you should register the vcard
namespace in the CC0 waiver mark. This enables the
vcard:Country property, as seen at the bottom of this example.
As in the datset example, we make a vcard:Country assertion
about the dct:publisher. In this case, that publisher is
http://creativecommons.org. For the vcard:Country
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 109
value, we override the literal United States between the span
tags by providing a content attribute, set to US. We additionally
specify the datatype for this content attribute with
datatype="dct:ISO3166". While one could use the content
between the span elements as the literal value for
vcard:Country, the CC0 and Public Domain Mark deeds require
a literal value with a datatype="ISO3166". That is, you don't
need to specify a contentattribute if your literal value is already
has that datatype (if US was between the span, rather than
United States, for example).
As in previous examples, we have the option of linking to Use
Guidelines for the work. To indicate that a link is to Use Guidelines we
include a rel="cc:useGuidelines" attribute in the link. If this
metadata is included, when someone clicks on the PDM mark the deed
should discover that metadata and link to the guideline URL. In this example
the href attribute is empty but would normally include the location of any
use guidelines. Please note that use guidelines are not legally binding, and
cc:useGuidelines is not meant to specify a URL that indicates
legally binding guidelines for the work.
Public Domain Mark
Marking license, publisher, and use guidelines
<div about="Mona_Lisa.jpeg"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <img
src="Mona_Lisa.jpeg" /> <br /> <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark
/1.0/"> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31
.png" style="border-style: none;" alt="Public
Domain Mark" /> </a> <br /> This work (<span
property="dct:title">Mona Lisa</span>, by <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vin
ci" rel="dct:creator"> <span
property="dct:title">Leonardo di ser Piero da
Vinci</span> </a>), identified by <a
href="http://yergler.net/"
rel="dct:publisher"><span
property="dct:title">Nathan Yergler</span></a>, is
free of known copyright restrictions. Users are
requested to honor the non-binding <a href=""
rel="cc:useGuidelines">use guidelines</a>. </div>
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Explanation
Using the Public Domain Mark is very similar to using the CC0
waiver. First we set the subject of our metadata to the content
being identified. In this case, we set about="Mona_Lisa.jpeg".
We then set a rel="license" attribute in the link to the PDM
mark, again even though the mark is not strictly a license. We can
also identify a creator of the work; in this case, the dct:creator
is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, which is a literal
dct:title value applied to the URL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci,
identifying the creator.
It is important we identify a dct:publisher of the resource,
which is the entity making the Public Domain identification. The
object of dct:publisher is a URL set with an href which is
then given a dct:title. In this case, the dct:publisher is
http://yergler.net/ which has the title Nathan Yergler.
As in previous examples, we have the option of linking to Use
Guidelines for the work. To indicate that a link is to Use Guidelines
we include a rel="cc:useGuidelines" attribute in the link. If
this metadata is included, when someone clicks on the PDM mark
the deed should discover that metadata and link to the guideline
URL. In this example the href attribute is empty but would
normally include the location of any use guidelines. Please note
that use guidelines are not legally binding, and
cc:useGuidelines is not meant to specify a URL that indicates
legally binding guidelines for the work.
Marking copyright registration
Marking a work as registered (CC Network)
<a xmlns:sioc="http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#"
rel="sioc:has_owner"
href="https://creativecommons.net/creativecommons/
"> <img
src="https://creativecommons.net/i/creativecommons
/" style="border:0;" /> </a> <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> <img
src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/us/88x3
1.png" style="border:0;" /> </a> <br /> <span
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
Simone Aliprandi – Creative Commons: a user guide - 111
property="dct:title">Example Work</span> by <a
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
href="http://creativecommons.org/"
property="cc:attributionName"
rel="cc:attributionURL">Creative Commons</a> is
licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"
> Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License</a>.
Explanation
Registering work on the CC Network is a multi-step process.
First, you must have an account on the CC Network. For more
details on obtaining one, see creativecommons.net. Then you must
find the stable URL to your work and follow the directions on the
CC Network to registering it as your work. In your CC Network
account, you should be given a copy-and-paste version of the CC
Network badge to place on the work.
In this example, you can see the CC Network badge with the
embedded registration metadata. First the sioc namespace is
declared. Then we link the badge to our CC Network account with a
rel="sioc:has_owner" to indicate that this is a link to the
owner of the current document.
With this metadata in place, when someone clicks through to
the license deed from the work, the deed will display registration
information and link to the registration page on the CC Network.
APPENDIX V
BOOKS, ARTICLES AND WEBSITES
ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS
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BOOKS AND ARTICLES
Bourcier, Danièle; Casanovas, Pompeu; Dulong de Rosnay, Mélanie;
Maracke Catharina (eds.) (2010), Intelligent Multimedia.
Managing creative works in a digital world, European Press
Academic Publishing.
Bourcier, Danièle; Dulong de Rosnay, Mélanie (eds.) (2004),
International Commons at the Digital Age. La création en
partage, Romillat.
Broussard, Sharee L. (2007), The copyleft movement: creative
commons licensing, Communication Research Trends. Available
at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7081/is_3_26/ai_n28
457434?tag=content;col1.
Elkin‐Koren, Niva (2006), Exploring Creative Commons: A
Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit, The Future of the Public
Domain (P. Bernt Hugenholtz and Lucie Guibault, eds.).
Available at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=8854
66.
Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi (2004), Free Culture: Cultivating the
Creative Commons. Available at
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000122/.
Garlick, Mia (2005), A Review of Creative Commons and
Science Commons
Hietanen, Herkko (2008), The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright
Licensing – How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the
Problems of All Rights Reserved, PhD dissertation. Available at
https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/42778.
Katz, Zachary (2006), Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of
Creative Commons Licensing, 46 IDEA 391.
Lessig, Lawrence (2003), The Creative Commons, Florida Law
Review 55: 763–777.
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Lessig, Lawrence (2004), The Creative Commons, 65 Mont. L. Rev.
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Lessig, Lawrence (2001), The future of ideas, Available at
http://www.the‐future‐of‐ideas.com/.
Lessig Lawrence (2004), Free culture, Available at
http://www.free‐culture.cc/freecontent/.
Lessig Lawrence (2008), Remix: Making Art and Commerce
Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Available at
www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix.
Mako Hill, Benjamin (2005), Towards a Standard of Freedom:
Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement. Available
at
http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html
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Moss, Giles (2005), On the Creative Commons: A Critique of the
Commons Without Commonality, Free Software Magazine.
Available at
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t_commonality.
Orlowski, Andrew (2009), The Tragedy of the Creative
Commons. Available at
http://andreworlowski.com/tag/creative‐commons/.
Pallas Loren, Lydia (2007), Building a Reliable Semicommons of
Creative Works: Enforcement of Creative Commons Licenses
and Limited Abandonment of Copyright". George Mason Law
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116 - order your paper copy on www.aliprandi.org/cc-user-guide
WEBSITES
http://www.creativecommons.org (Creative Commons official
website).
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ (the “Frequently asked
questions” official webpage).
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Videos (videos about
Creative Commons).
http://creativecommons.org/about/history/ (History of
Creative Commons).
http://www.lessig.org/ (Lawrence Lessig personal website).
http://www.wikipedia.org/ (the famous free encyclopedia,
published with a Creative Commons license).
http://www.jamendo.com/ (a large archive where artists allow
anyone to download and share their music using CC
licenses).
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons (a large archive with
many images that are licensed under Creative Commons)
http://www.copyleft‐italia.it/cc (Italian project involved in
dissemination about copyleft and Creative Commons)