IT Law Journal

administrator January 14th, 2008

Alternative Licensing: Challenges in cultivating a sharing culture
by Michael Vernon Guerrero

The About page of the Creative Commons website¹ sums up the direction towards creative public collaboration well:

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.”

Creative Commons aspires to cultivate a commons in which people can feel free to reuse not only ideas, but also words, images, and music without asking explicit permission — because permission, through alternative licensing and within the terms clearly provided, has already been granted to everyone²

Nevertheless, there may exist some aversion in certain individuals against the utilization of complex concepts in the fine details of the permission granted, allegedly fit only for a lawyer to read. Be as it may, oversimplification of the permission granted has its own evil to defeat. A pre-provided permission of “You may use and distribute,” without further details in the articulation of the licensor’s intent, for example, does not provide a clear parameter in the exercise by the licensee or user of the permission actually granted. Neither the inadvertent allowance for misconstrued intention nor a creeping culture of infringement tolerance seem to be viable alternatives to encourage sharing, creativity and free culture.

Yet still, it is also not avoidable that there could be certain criticism from individuals or sectors on the apparent development of a burdensome “licensing culture” that stifles creativity and free culture.³ The resulting perception about such apparent development is understandable inasmuch as Creative Commons licenses⁴ are not the only licenses utilized to determine the terms of use of shared works, and that frustration could come in when the issue on the interoperability of Creative Commons licenses with other licensing options like Design Science License,⁵ Free Art License,⁶ Free Music Public License,⁷ Open Content License,⁸ Open Music License,⁹ Open Publication License,¹⁰ and GNU Free Documentation License,¹¹ come into focus, especially when components towards a blended result come from sources shared under different licensing regimes. It is thus a major development when, for example, last December 2007, Wikimedia Foundation announced — in seeking to respond responsibly to longstanding community concerns about issues of compatibility between the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, as well as to continue longstanding traditions of strong community input and control over major decisions affecting the projects –its resolution requesting the modification of the GNU Free Documentation License in the fashion proposed by the Free Software Foundation to allow a possible migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, if so desired by the community.¹² Although it is unclear whether the Wikipedia community, for example, would eventually support a shift to CC-BY-SA from GFDL in the future, what is truly significant in this development is the agreement to make licenses compatible to encourage the growth of the commons, or “toward a world in which the free content world is not fractured by license incompatibility.”¹³

In the end, notwithstanding differences in opinions as to the proper direction or appropriate solution towards a freer flow of creativity, if not of information, and notwithstanding licensor’s preference or loyalties as to which is the better license to use, there remains a common orientation towards alternative means to empower individuals and to benefit society. A long road is provided ahead of us to tackle the challenges relating to legal sharing, and to take the opportunities to contribute to each other’s lives.

1. http://creativecommons.org/about/ [↩]
2. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Legal_Concepts [↩]
3. Dizon, Bong. “The Burdens of License Culture: Why Even Copyleft and Creative Commons Licenses Do Not Ensure Free Culture.” 14 May 2006. (http://lawnormscode.sync.ph/?p=18) [↩]
4. http://creativecommons.org/about/license/ [↩]
5. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/dsl.html [↩]
6. http://artlibre.org/licence/lalgb.html [↩]
7. http://www.fmpl.org/ [↩]
8. http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml [↩]
9. http://openmusic.linuxtag.org/showitem.php?item=209 [↩]
10. http://opencontent.org/openpub/ [↩]
11. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html [↩]
12. Resolution: License Update. WikiMedia Foundation. 1 December 2007. (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update) [↩]
13. Linksvayer, Mike. “Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia.” 1 December 2007. (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7876) [↩]

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