|
home · articles · cc licensing practices reviewed |
A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
|
| |
CC licensing practices reviewed
Alek Tarkowski · Warszawa (Poland) · Mar 20th, 2007 1:04 pm · 33 votes · no comments made
|
| |
| Damn traffic signs, by by Alpha600, flickr.com |
 |
The European Union has been supporting an experiment in urban planning, in which several cities across Europe have removed all traffic signs from their streets.
In 2004, Wired reported on a Dutch town called Makkinga, which declared itself 'Verkeersbordvrij'''free of traffic signs'. The theory behind this experiment is that excessive rules make people irresponsible. Once rules are removed, people become considerate. Lacking formal guidelines, they establish order intuitively - through gestures or eye contact.
The traffic system is a classic example of a common good. Experiments with rules-free traffic show that this system can be managed like most common goods - in an informal, communal manner.
Warsaw is a city of constant traffic jams, speed freaks and crazed drivers. Biking around town is often an extreme sport and even walking can be dangerous. Rules seem to be there only to be broken. It is hard to imagine the removal of traffic rules ending in anything else but mayhem. Still, the example of Makkinga shows that at least in some places there are alternatives to what seems to be rules that are set in stone.
One of the criticisms of Creative Commons made by Shuddhabrata Sengupta is that the licensing scheme overly regulates a sphere that should be governed by an unspoken, assumed ethic of communal sharing and reciprocity. In his Letter to the Commons, Sengupta wrote, '... in the space you designate as 'commons', we found that the rule is - take in accordance to the label on the thing that you encounter, and give according to the measure of the licence you prefer'.
A similar argument is made by Niva Elkin-Koren in 'Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit', in which she argues that Creative Commons licensing, even if introducing an alternative and open licensing model, nevertheless 'strengthens the hold of copyright in our everyday life.' The concept and mechanisms of licensing are introduced to people who would not previously consider copyrighting their works, and thus possibly commodify their creations. Creative Commons, writes Elkin-Koren, 'may actually strengthen the rights discourse and the hold of property as a conceptual framework and regulatory scheme for creative works."
If there is an 'iron cage of copyright' clamping down culture, as the criticism goes, then schemes like Creative Commons, piggy-backing on top of the copyright system, are inadvertently helping to build that cage. There is truth to this argument - but only as long as we look at the Creative Commons licensing model as an abstract design. This picture changes, in my belief, once we look at actual licensing practices.
The truth is, we know very little about this, as there have been no rigorous studies of open licensing practice. All evidence we have at the moment is anecdotal. Yet even a quick look at the way content is licenced shows that licensors approach licensing in a much looser manner than intended. Looking at some random CC licenced examples, I've found content licenced without referring to the particular terms of the licence, as if a simple 'Creative Commons licence' existed. I've found copies and derivative works used without proper attribution, sites with community-built content using the CC licensing scheme, but only partially, and the use of a different licence than the one providing intended freedoms and limitations, and so on.
To some extent these are mistakes, probably due to insignificant knowledge, and these errors that can be corrected with a bit of effort. But this is also a sign that licensors use CC licences in their own fuzzy ways - almost everything on the internet becomes appropriated by the users and it would be surprising if things were different with CC licences. What this 'sloppiness' suggests is that people using the licences are not the rational, calculating licensors that the above-mentioned critics assume they are, and the licences are used only to some extent, as the legal tools that they are designed to be.
The alternative licensing scheme in the form of Creative Commons licences is confusing even to many lawyers who specialise in intellectual property law. No wonder that it is an arcane matter for the average content creator ' even though six CC licences doesn't seem like a big number. People still get confused by licensing choices and often the decisions they make might not be rational. What's left is the Creative Commons logo and name - and these are treated as symbols of certain values, such as openness and sharing. For many people the phrase 'CC licenced' is more of a badge of affiliation to a social and cultural movement, than a label for a legal licensing scheme.
Of course, I am not arguing that people do not want their licensing conditions respected. But the marginal number of court cases dealing with CC licensing suggests that the community is until now able to govern the use of this commons without resorting to formal, legal mechanisms. And the informal mechanisms deal with licensing schemes the way an average person comprehends law - in a much less disciplined manner.
CC licensing does involve labeling - but I would argue that these labels are unlike the traffic signs that regulate movement on roads every couple of metres. The space of free culture might have more in common with the sign-free town of Makkinga. CC licensing badges, in the eyes of their users, designate a space of fuzzy formal rules and greater consideration.
tags: poland policy-law cc licensing
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote