We are all aware with Creative Commons. Flickr photos are under CC licences, web designs are licensed, blog posts have some rights reserved and even some wikis have licenses on them. Purpose of Creative Commons is to promote sharing of information and substitute the restrictions of current copyright laws.

Creators have several good reasons to publish their work under a Creative Commons license, but there are some negative implications of Creative Commons, that we don’t observe at first sight.

From new technologies emerge new restrictions

When new technologies emerge, new ways of protecting our work come long.

Before Copyright.
Marshall McLuhan said about copyright laws that

the invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. (from the medium is the massage).

Copyright.
So, before the absolute expansion of the Web, there was copyright. For an artist to put his/her work out to the public wasn’t as easy as it is today. There were no computers to produce cheap, quality work; there was no Web with its wide public.
Artists needed someone who would finance the whole production process. And even when they did find someone and although “all rights reserved” applied the moment a work was created, sometimes artist didn’t really care. The purpose wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, the purpose was artistic expression. So copyright protected the ones caring and run obsolete in any other case.

Creative Commons.
The explosion of the Web changed the scene. Production and publication were very easy and very fast. So was copying and distributing. Awareness of self-expression rose. Every producer - regardless what he/she produced - wanted to protect his work. This needed to be done in an obvious (the web is huge) and fast (the works produced are numerous) way. So Creative Commons emerged.

 

According to wikipedia’s description

Creative commons is a non-profit organization, which provides several free licenses for the owners to use when releasing their work on the Web.

The value of Creative Commons

• Free flow of information; It is true, that the minute you create a work, it is immediately copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” license. This means, that you are the sole owner controlling who may copy, adapt, redistribute, publish etc.
  Since this perspective can be very restrictive to sharing and providing information, Creative Commons comes as a new parameter, promoting innovation and free flow of information.Creative Commons, under that perspective, combines a moral with a legal objective (although it has been argued, that the moral objective of Creative Commons is of lesser priority - at least in comparison to the Free Software Movement).

• Choice; Creative Commons provides a wide variety of licenses. There are 4 major licenses, which can be mixed, producing 16 possible combinations.

• Ease of use; Licensing your work in Creative Commons is easy. Very easy. In one step you choose your license and in the next your work has “some rights reserved”.

Criticism on Creative Commons

Over time, Creative Commons has been considerably criticized.

• It has been argued, that the legal code of the CC licenses has additional information, that people don’t read - they stick only to the Commons Deed.
• There are still several misconceptions about Creative Commons and licensing in general.
• It has even been argumented, that Creative Commons is completely pointless - although I would not go that far.

The public’s sense of ownership

For me the value of Creative Commons is undisputable. The public is too vast and the need for the protection of intellectual property is very important. Creative Commons gave developers the option to keep their work more open, than traditional, standard copyright laws do.

But the ease of use and the wide popularity of Creative Commons has also increased the awareness of the our sense of ownership. Suddenly, everything we produce - may it be a funny 5minute sketch, a blog post, a program or a whole book - is subjected to licensing.
Why do we put everything under a Creative Commons license?

• Maybe we believe, that our work might some day achieve a great financial value and we don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Or we believe, that the web is full of malevolent individuals wanting to take advantage of our work and republish and their own identity.

I don’t want to argument why or why not one should put his/her work under a license, this is a personal decision. But just let me point out, that

• giving something for free does not necessarily mean not having any gain
• if the web were full of copyists and thieves, it probably wouldn’t be that successful.

I am not putting my work under any license, firstly because I don’t mind if someone copies my content. Secondly, I have a lot to gain from the online community and maybe that’s my way of giving something back.

After all if we only take and don’t give something back we will end up exhausting the free resources as Garrett Hardin’s theory of “the tragedy of the Commons” explains.

Do you have your work under a Creative Commons License? Why or why not? I’m really interested in your opinions.