Signing away your rights in perpetuity?
First things first, Creative Commons is a great idea that I thoroughly approve of and plan at some point to participate in. But I'm being a little more reserved about it than other people seem to be. And the reason? Whether or not I wish to exploit the rights afforded to me by copyright, I'm anxious about the concept of giving them up in perpetuity.
Here's the thing. Webloggers are - by nature, perhaps - faddish people. The memes that spread around the net are often spread by webloggers. Other than e-mail, weblogs are probably the most effective down-home meme-spreaders on the planet. Hence we have blogchalking, son of warchalking, we have googlism, we have the Friday Five. We have Blogger Code and we have quiz after quiz after quiz. People are XHTML 1.0 compliant, and then they're not. They're transitional, then they're strict. They're three-column. Then they're kottke-esque.
All these memes are transient and reversable. Change your code, change it back. New design, change it back. Put up a meme, take it down or apologise for it. Muck it around as well, change it, adapt it, rerelease it into the wild. But Creative Commons isn't like that. It's not reversable. You're giving up rights (that maybe you shouldn't have - I'm not in the mood to debate that) forever. You're retroactively putting (to a greater or lesser extent) all the work associated with your site in the public arena. And there's no way take it back. Legally you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Now the chances of someone wanting to do something with the content on most weblogs is pretty limited. And the Creative Commons people are brilliant people who have developed a way of giving up only the rights that we're individually comfortable with. And moreover we tacitly allow people to participate in a fairly loose and unenforced honour-code version of copyright every day - that's the commenting and copying, the cutting-and-pasting that is part and parcel of writing in a style that is always at least partially scholiastic in nature. So I'm not saying that you shouldn't participate if you're sure that's what you want to do. Far from it. Jump in. Just be sure you recognise the scale of what you're doing before you display the notice. It's possible that a decision made on a whim on a Thursday afternoon at the pub could come back to haunt you later on...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
i recently licensed the copyright of my site under a creative commons licence, but i thought long and hard before doing so. i didn't want to throw my work willy-nilly into the public domain, but on the other hand i wanted it to be open for others to explore, replicate and quote freely from as long as i am credited. (sure, as a proprietor of a low-traffic blog that's pretty narcissistic of me, but that's one of the reasons i started a blog in the first place, the whole 'look at me!' factor.)
regarding the web, i think this is fair. as to whether i would license say, a book or a screenplay under a creative commons license? that's a different question, one that i'd have to think harder and longer about.
→ Posted by: Mac at February 1, 2003 12:31 PM
I have also been debating whether to license my site under a Creative Commons license. I would like to because it seems like such a cool idea, but what stops me is the fact I don't understand copyright issues at all. (scary, isn't it?)
I do plan to participate, but I'd like to understand exactly what I am getting into before I join. (which is funny because I'm usually so impulsive...)
→ Posted by: Dawn at February 1, 2003 10:06 PM
Thank you for putting my nervousness about this into words. I went to Creative Commons several times and looked at all the different licenses. Every time I left without selecting a license, thinking I'm not sure about this and don't want to do it just because everyone else is doing it.
Oh, and you forgot geo-url in your list of memes going around ;-)
→ Posted by: Armin at February 1, 2003 10:56 PM
Ummm... actually I think you're missing the point about Creative Commons. You're not giving up copyright, in any sense: You still own your copyright material, lock, stock and barrel. CC is all about giving other people a license to use your work in a way that's useful, but which doesn't stop you doing anything with it.
→ Posted by: Ian Betteridge at February 2, 2003 5:15 PM
I want to clarify again that I'm not against the Creative Commons project - in fact I'm an eager exponent of it. I just want to make sure that people know what they're doing when they sign up to it. You're quite right of course - obviously you can do anything you want with your own material - but what I'm saying is that if you say that other people can use your material for commercial purposes, then in essence you can't then withdraw that permission subsequently should you change your mind. The material that you've placed in the public sphere can't realistically be taken be taken back. It may sound like a trivial point and obvious to everyone - but I'm not sure that all of the people who take on the creative commons license are aware of that. I just want them to go into it with their eyes open, comfortable with the idea that they're entering a long-term relationship with 'the commons'. Having said all of that, if I am wrong and this is not the case, I would appreciate any clarification you might be able to provide...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 2, 2003 6:06 PM
"You're retroactively putting (to a greater or lesser extent) all the work associated with your site in the public arena."
Actually no. With the Creative Commons license, it's not blanket coverage. You can pick and choose what elements you put online that are covered by the CC license. While I've covered everthing, had I wanted to, I could have selected day by day what photographs would be covered.
→ Posted by: heather at February 3, 2003 1:06 AM
Still, most people seem to be slapping the license onto their sites without a care in the world - and it's still true that the photos you open up to use cannot have those restrictions placed back upon them again, isn't it?
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 3, 2003 8:52 AM
Without a care in the world? I'm not privvy to the thought process involved with everyone's decision, so i can't say whether or not they slapped a license onto their site in this manner. In my own case i went back and forth for abouth three weeks. And the restrictions, you're most likely correct. Why don't you ask a few people instead of assuming we're all sheep?
→ Posted by: heather at February 3, 2003 2:00 PM
God, I'm sorry Heather - I didn't mean to sound snippy. The whole point of my post was to express my worry that a lot of people weren't necessarily putting a lot of thought into their decisions to put their work into Creative Commons, which is unsurprising, I think, since so many disposable memes pass through the blogging sphere. I certainly wasn't trying to say that everyone hadn't thought it through, or that it was a bad thing for people to do. I wasn't trying to imply that people were sheep at all, I was just trying to make sure that people who were thinking of entering into it thought through the implications. That's all.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 3, 2003 3:23 PM
I have to agree with you, Tom (and Mac). I work in the copyright "sector" (as it were), so I at least have some knowledge of licensing issues, but I know that the subject of copyright and IP alienates and confuses a lot of people.
I was initially hesitant to add a CC license to my site until I had considered and reconsidered the ramifications (not just of my site, but on the internet as a whole, actually). There's also my personal problems with the majority CC's approach coming from an American perspective and American law. This is an issue I have with much of the internet, since such a large proportion of it is approached with the American perspective rather than an international one. But I'm not sure how it's possible for the CC to get around that, short of hiring legal advisors from every single country in the world...
→ Posted by: Anna at February 5, 2003 11:12 AM