This article forms part of Wired.co.uk's Creative Commons Week, which sees a range of articles published on the topics of CC licensing, as well as the past, present and future of the Creative Commons movement.
Creative Commons isn't the only game in town if you want to opt out of the traditional "all rights reserved" framework, and allow people to interact with your content in different ways.
Most alternatives to copyright fall under the banner of "copyleft" -- a pun on "copyright" -- which indicates the use of copyright law to make available the right to distribute copies or modify the existing content. These licences tend to include a "ShareAlike" caveat, also known somewhat pejoratively as viral licensing, which demands that any derivative works must be licensed identically to the original piece of content.
The copyleft movement may have begun in 1975, in the newsletter of the People's Computer Company. A contributor named Dennis Allison laid out the specifications for a version of the BASIC programming language that would fit in two or three kilobytes of memory, naming it "Tiny BASIC".
After this was ported to the Intel 8080 microprocessor by Li-Chen Wang, he labelled the spec "Copyleft: All Wrongs Reserved". The next person who modified the code from Wang's specification kept the notice intact, and it began to spread.
In 1988, Richard Stallman created his own copyright licences to try and get around what he saw as the problem of "software hoarding", where companies would take public domain content, modify it, then refuse to release the ensuing work into the public domain.
He created the Emacs General Public Licence, the first copyleft licence, which eventually evolved into the GNU General Public Licence, better known as the GPL.
The GPL, which has become one of the most popular free software licences, explicitly made clear that the maximum number of rights had to be transferred to the program's users, despite subsequent revisions to the code. It also laid out the rights that the user had -- the freedom to use a work, the freedom to study it, the freedom to copy it and share with others, and the freedom to modify it and distribute derivative works. These four tenets became common in copyleft licences.
Outside of the software movement, there are other suggestions.
Economist Dean Baker proposed an "Artistic Freedom Voucher". While not a license as such, it offers an alternative framework to the biggest problem with the existing copyright regime -- the difficulty of chasing down infringers on the web. Baker proposed that every adult be given a refundable tax credit of, say, £100, which could only be used to support artistic or creative work.
Baker claims that such a scheme would raise up to $20 billion annually in the United States, which is more than they currently receive under the existing copyright system. Potential recipients would register in a national database, in the same way that charities currently do, to qualify for tax-exempt status. It would mean that they get paid, and their work would -- as a result -- be placed into the public domain. Critics, however, say that people shouldn't be forced to spend money on art and culture, as opposed to paying rent or feeding their family.
Speaking of the public domain, many artists choose to voluntarily forfeit the copyright process entirely, placing their work straight into the public domain. Much of the content on Wikimedia Commons has been released by the copyright holder into the public domain, and Flickr also makes an effort to encourage people (particularly institutions) to label their work with "No known copyright restrictions".
However, it's a surprisingly difficult thing to do, and almost impossible globally, so Creative Commons has launched a project called CC0, which explicitly states "No Rights Reserved". It's a legal tool that lets you relinquish as many rights as you're able to do so under law. You can find out more about the CC0 mark, and choose to use it yourself, here.
What does CC mean for: Science, Software, Photography, Music
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width: 0;"/></a>
This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
