"Our current culture is one in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past"
(Lessig, 2004)
Creative commons can be seen by most people as a solution to society but at the same time it can be a failure when dealing with copyright and authorship. Creative commons is a non-profit organisation which gives creators a simple way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The creative commons basically works so that it allows a creator to retain their copyright whilst allowing the public to certain uses of their work. This is possible because what the creative commons license does is it changes the copyright terms from "All rights reserved" to "some rights reserved" With this in place society becomes a 'shared culture' with free access to work for legal sharing, copying, repurposing and remixing. This for many people around the world sounds like a solution to a problem and opens up a whole new door of opportunities that were never possible before, however there are some failures to this fast growingcompany. (lessig,2004)
Whilst with creative commons it is free to share, copy, distribute and remix to the work, there are conditions and once these conditions are breached it can cause serious copyright problems. There are six major creative commons licenses. The conditions of legally attaining another's piece of work include, Attribution(work must be attributed in specified manner by the author or licensor),Non-commercial purposes(licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for non-commercial purposes), No derivatives (allowing only the original work, with out derivatives) and share alike(allowing derivative works under the same or similar license).
Amajor problem which can occur in relation to creative commons is incorrect licensing. For instance with photo sharing web sites a user may accidently upload a copyrighted image and incorrectly give it a CC license. If other people using the site download the same image and re-use it, the original copyright holder can sue. An example where this can occur is a case in 2006 where CC license was first taken to court regarding a matter where a podcaster Adam Curry sued a dutch tabloid who published photos without permission from his flickr page. The CC non-commercial license was applied in this matter because the photos were licensed under it. The verdict concluded in this case that whilst the tabloid was guilty they avoided paying restitution to him under the condition he does not repeat the offence. An analysis of the decision states "The dutch court's decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a CC 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"
(Lessig, 2004)
By looking at Creative Commons from two perspectives, both as a solution and a failure it can be concluded that it can work for many people but only to a certain extent, as copyright laws can cause major issues.
Bibliography
http://www.free-culture.cc/
L.Lessig, The future of Ideas and Free Culture, http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/
J Rosenoer, 1997, Cyberlaw: the law of the internet, http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HlG2esMIm7kC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=authorship+and+copyright+on+internet&ots=MItsjZZgfk&sig=VZ_RsC_u4juY92EQS6hS0gpueJU#v=onepage&q=authorship%20and%20copyright%20on%20internet&f=false
L lessig, 2004, free Culture, http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/landscape.a5.pdf
http://creativecommons.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
J Dvorak, 2005, Creative commons license, http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/creative-commons-license-solution-looking-for-a-problem/
L Lessig 2004, http://www.slideshare.net/thecleversheep/creative-commons-what-every-educator-needs-to-know-presentation
Bollier, david, Viral Spiral, hhtp://www.creativecommon.org/weblog/entry/12448
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