19 The History of Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a set of legal tools, a nonprofit organization, as well as a global network and a movement — all inspired by people’s willingness to share their creativity and knowledge, and enabled by a set of open copyright licenses.
Creative Commons began in response to an outdated global copyright legal system. CC’s founders recognized the mismatch between what technology enables and what copyright restricts, and they provided an alternative approach for creators who want to share their work. Today, that approach is used by millions of creators around the globe. CC licenses are built on copyright and are designed to give more options to creators who would like to share. Over time, the role, and value of Creative Commons has expanded. This unit will introduce you to where CC came from and where it is headed.
Why CC Matters
To understand how a set of copyright licenses could inspire a global movement, you need to know a bit about the origin of Creative Commons.
- What were the legal and cultural reasons for the founding of Creative Commons?
- Why has CC grown into a global movement?
- When did you first learn about Creative Commons?
Think about how you would articulate what CC is to someone who has never heard of it. To fully understand the organization, it helps to start with a bit of history.
The Story of Creative Commons
The story of Creative Commons begins with copyright. As you’ve learned, copyright grants a set of exclusive rights to a creator, so that the creator can prevent others from copying and adapting her work for a limited time. In other words, copyright law strictly regulates who is allowed to copy and share with whom. (And, sometimes, grants exceptions that the creator is not permitted to control.)
The internet has given us the opportunity to access, share, and collaborate on human creations (all governed by copyright) at an unprecedented scale. The sharing capabilities made possible by digital technology are in tension with the sharing restrictions embedded within copyright laws around the world.
Creative Commons was created to help address the tension between the ways creators wish to share digital works globally and copyright regulation. As previously mentioned, the story of Creative Commons began with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the term of copyright for every work in the United States—even those already published—for an additional 20 years, so the copyright term equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years.
“Larry Lessig giving #ccsummit2011 keynote” Photo from Flickr, Author: DTKindler Photo
CC BY 2.0 Unported
Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig believed this new law was unconstitutional. The term of copyright had been continually extended over the years, with seemingly little regard for the eventual use of the work by the public when it enters the Public Domain.
The new law was also challenging to align with the purpose of copyright as it is written into the U.S. Constitution—to create an incentive for authors to share their works by granting them a limited monopoly over them. How could the law possibly further incentivize the creation of works that already existed?
Lessig represented a web publisher, Eric Eldred, who had made a career of making works available as they passed into the public domain (along with several other parties whose livelihoods involved making use of public domain works). Together, they challenged the constitutionality of the Act. The case, known as Eldred v. Ashcroft, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Eldred lost.
Creative Commons, intended to be a temporary solution until copyright law was changed to be a more reasonable balance, was looking like it might have staying power.
Enter Creative Commons
Inspired by the value of Eldred’s goal to make more creative works freely available on the internet, and responding to a growing community of bloggers who were creating, remixing and sharing content, Lessig and others came up with an idea. They created a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons and, in 2002, they published the Creative Commons licenses—a set of free, public licenses that would allow creators to keep their copyrights while sharing their works on more flexible terms than the default “all rights reserved.” Copyright is automatic, whether you want it or not. And while some people want to reserve all of their rights, many wish to share their work with the public more freely. The idea behind CC licensing was to create an easy way for creators who wanted to share their works in ways that were consistent with copyright law.
From the start, Creative Commons licenses were intended to be used by creators all over the world. The CC founders were initially motivated by a piece of U.S. copyright legislation, but similarly restrictive copyright laws all over the world restricted how our shared culture and collective knowledge could be used. Digital technologies and the internet have opened new ways for people to participate in culture and knowledge production. Watch this short video, A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan. CC BY-NC-SA, to get a sense of the vision behind Creative Commons.
Since Creative Commons was founded, much has changed in the way people share and how the internet operates. In many places around the world, the restrictions on using creative works have increased. Yet, sharing and remix are the norm online. Think about your favorite video mashup or even the photos your friend posted on social media last week. Sometimes this type of sharing and remix happen in violation of copyright law, and sometimes they happen within social media networks that do not allow those works to be shared on other parts of the web.
In domains like textbook publishing, academic research, documentary film, and many more, restrictive copyright rules continue to inhibit creation, access, and remix. CC tools are helping to solve this problem by establishing a standard set of conditions that reserve some rights to the author but allow the public to share those works and use them under less restrictive conditions. Today, Creative Commons licenses are used on over 2.5 billion works online across 9 million websites. The grand experiment that started over 20 years ago has been a success, including in ways unimagined by CC’s founders.
While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses. They are up-to-date, free-to-use, irrevocable, interoperable, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions, and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses.
In the next section, you’ll learn more about what Creative Commons looks like today—the licenses, the organization, and the movement.
Final remarks
Technology makes it possible for online content to be consumed by millions of people at once, and it can be copied, shared, and remixed with speed and ease. But copyright law places limits on our ability to take advantage of these possibilities. Creative Commons was founded to help us realize the full potential of the internet.
