What is Creative Commons: A brief history
What is Creative Commons?
A brief history
Why do people create things? Why do people write poems, stories, and books, sing their own songs, paintings or photographs? For fame? Fortune? Of course, there are always a few who make it big, or even those who derive a stable living from their art.
But do people perhaps take on creative ventures for less materialistic reasons? Is there a reason we make things other than just the hope for direct monetary compensation?
Are our creative ventures meant to be shared, more than perhaps they are intended to be monetized?
The rise of the Creative Commons movement suggests that this may in fact be the case – that for billions of people, creating something and sharing it directly with the hopes that others will find it interesting or useful enough to reuse or share is enough of a reward.
You may have seen the Creative Commons logo or license on a variety of media you might have encountered online – a Flickr image, a Wikipedia article, or a Youtube video perhaps. The Creative Commons license indicates that the work associated was created and distributed with easy online distribution and reuse in mind.
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| An example of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license logo. This image is sourced from Creative Commons and reused under a CC-BY 4.0 license. |
But how was Creative Commons started?
This blog post will give a brief introduction to the origins of Creative Commons as a movement and an organization and will give you a sense of why the movement matters and how to get involved today.
The Copyright Term Extension Act
Our story begins in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
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| Sonny Bono was better known for "I Got You Babe" before he got into politics. Image sourced from Wikimedia and used under a CC0 public domain license. |
This piece of law aimed to prevent older copyrighted works from entering the public domain in the United States. The way American copyright law works, in a nutshell, is to prevents people from duplicating or redistributing creative work for a certain period of time after its creation.
For individually-authored works like a novel or a photograph, this time period was the lifespan of the author plus 50 years.
Corporate-authored works follow different rules, since corporations don’t really have lifespans the way that people do. For corporate authored works – like for instance a movie produced by a film studio – this period was 75 years.[1]
After this period, you could do whatever you wanted with these works as they entered the public domain. You could rewrite them, reprint them freely, perform or exhibit them without paying royalties, - in other words, the materials became open for reuse as anyone saw fit.
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act aimed to extend the period of copyright protection – which would prevent materials from entering the public domain for another 20 years.
As the US Senate put it, the bill aimed “to ensure adequate copyright protection for American works in foreign nations and the continued economic benefits of a healthy surplus balance of trade in the exploitation of copyrighted works”[2] – that is, I hope it is not editorializing the matter too much to say that the law intended that by extending the copyright term, the United States could, thanks to international copyright agreements, ensure that the owners of American cultural products continued to receive royalties from abroad.
The detractors of this act called it the “Mickey Mouse protection act” due to its timing – Mickey Mouse would have entered the public domain in 2003 and avoided doing so thanks to the unanimous passage of the Sono Bono Act in 1998 under the Clinton administration.[3]
To be fair to the critics, Disney had lobbied for copyright extension in the United States leading up to the case.[4]
Opposition to the Copyright Term Extension Act
After the Sonny Bono act was passed, its detractors coalesced around a man named Eric Eldred.
Eldred was an open culture activist, who had created a website known as Eldritch Press which published online freely accessible versions of books in the public domain.
He was joined by a group of commercial publishers and open culture activist organizations – these included groups like Dover Publications, a for profit press known for value editions of public domain novels, and the nonprofit Free Software Foundation, an organization interested in open computing infrastructure.
Eldred sought to repeal the Sonny Bono Act as unconstitutional, and to ensure that works continued to enter the public domain.
While his appeals, making it all the way to the US Supreme Court, were unsuccessful, a coalition and a movement emerged which would dramatically alter the field of copyright law from these appeals.[5] The people who supported Eldred’s case realized they had a lot in common.
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| James Boyle (intellectual property lawyer, left) next to Eric Eldred at a Creative Commons board meeting. This image by Joi Ito used under a CC-BY-2.0 license. |
These included a broad cast with diverse backgrounds. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, served as Eldred’s lead counsel and would take a leading role in the Creative Commons organization. Hal Abelson, a professor in computer science at MIT, provided continuity with the open software movement based in his experience as the cofounder of the Free Software Movement in 1985.[6] A host of experts and open culture activists contributed to the case and coalesced a movement around their advocacy.
The emergence of Creative Commons
Enter Creative Commons.
The movement which spawned the Creative Commons organization united open culture activists, artists, intellectual property lawyers, and open source software movement veterans. Creative Commons was established as an organization in 2001, supported by the work of many individuals and the nonprofit Centre for the Public Domain.[7]
The fundamental tension the Creative Commons coalition was aiming at was the ease of sharing creative works freely on the internet and the restrictions of existing copyright law. Online creative works can be easily copied between different users without restrictions. People may want to share their works without restriction – and copyright law may stand in the way of that. In a click you can copy and paste and duplicate computer files – and if not for copyright laws, this might enable broad distribution of materials.
Whether you want it or not, when you create something it is automatically copyrighted. This limits others’ abilities to share, reuse or modify your work. Many people posting materials online do not wish to enforce their works copyright – and so Creative Commons as an organization set about giving them the option to renounce some aspects of their copyright to enable their works to be shared more broadly.
In 2002, the Creative Commons organization issued the first set of Creative Commons licenses. These could be used to distribute otherwise copyright protected works freely online.
Authors could distribute materials with some restrictions or with none. For instance, using a Creative Commons noncommercial attribution license would others to reuse or redistribute a given work as long as the author was acknowledged and the reuse was for noncommercial purposes. Alternatively, authors could use a public domain license to cede as many rights as possible to their work, allowing any reuse for any purpose by anyone free of conditions imposed by copyright.
Creative Commons takes off
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| Lawrence Lessig in 2011. Image by David Kindler used under a CC-BY-2.0 license. |
By 2003, 1 million works used CC licenses – by 2005, an estimated 20 million.[8] Integration with Flickr and Wikipedia dramatically boosted the profile of these licenses in the late 2000s, and added millions of Creative Commons users. [9] By 2015 an estimated 1 billion works were licensed using Creative Commons worldwide. The licenses, now in their 4th edition, consist of a plain language version, an extensive legal code, and a machine-readable label. They have been ported into 30 languages and are enforceable in all countries which are signatories of international copyright treaties. The licenses provide clear ways to encourage others to use and reuse creative work online, and have become a cornerstone of the open internet movement to this day.
You can get involved in Creative Commons projects by visiting network.creative commons.org – and learn more about how you can contribute to the movement. If you create something, it’s easy to license it with a Creative Commons license – enabling you to contribute, in your own way, to the open culture movement of which Creative Commons is a part.
Creative Commons gave creators options to distribute their work openly around the world. It gave creators a language to reuse others work in creating their own, and continues to do so to this day. If knowledge and creativity are better when they are shared Creative Commons might be a good proof that this is the case.
[1] Creative Commons. 2024. Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians, and Open Culture, 1.1: The Story of Creative Commons. https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/1-1-the-story-of-creative-commons/
[2] US Senate. 1996. Copyright Term Extension Act of 1996. Report no. 104-315. https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/s-rep104-315.html
[3] Jennifer Jenkins. “Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle.” Center for the Study of the Public Domain (Duke University). https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
[4] Linda Greenhouse. February 20, 2002. "Justices to Review Copyright Extension". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/business/justices-to-review-copyright-extension.html.
[5] Eric Eldred, et al. v. John D. Ashcroft. 2003. Supreme Court of the United States 537 U.S. 186. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/eldrdedo.pdf
[6] Duncan Geere. 2011. “The history of Creative Commons.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/history-of-creative-commons/.
[7] Creative Commons Wiki. "History." https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/History
[8] Creative Commons. “History.”Archived from the original at https://web.archive.org/web/20160304022840/https://creativecommons.org/about/history/
[9] Duncan Geere. 2011. “The history of Creative Commons.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/history-of-creative-commons/.
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