Hip to be CC-ed
A friend of mine sent me a link to a message about copyright infringement involving Creative Commons (CC) licences at Buzznet, a community website that allows photo, video and text sharing.
“Buzznet.com - serious theft, beware,” writes kmye-chan, a French graphic artist who found her works copied without permission by Buzznet’s users. Kmye-chan is angered, not just by people copying her works without permission, but also by the Buzznet system, which by default licences all works under a CC Attribution licence.
The gist of her argument is as follows: copying of works without attribution or permission is common on the internet. “No big deal, I immediately think. Most of them didn’t give credit, so I was going to ask them to credit me,” she said. Proper attribution is all she usually cares about, because she feels that the rules of copyright serve as a hindrance to further copying of her works.
But through default open licensing with CC licences, the unauthorised copy becomes available under quite liberal conditions, to which the original author has not agreed. While regular copyright hinders further ‘downstream’ copying through its “all rights reserved” rule, CC licensing on this type of site presents the unauthorised copy as available, often even for commercial reuse.
I think this is an important criticism: that the use of CC licensing, upon infringement of the downstream copies of a work, makes the unauthorized copying even more damaging to the author of the original piece.
Upload but don’t forget your rights
While it might seem that Buzznet members are the culprits here, I believe the site itself is largely to blame as well. As kmye-chan observes, “Of course, supposedly users should upload their own works ‘ but everyone who owns this type of website knows it’s not going to happen”.
Sites like Buzznet have not been created with the Do-It-Yourself, participatory-culture artist in mind - they are rather online scrapbooks for teenagers and youth, the majority of which do not create their own works but rather copy, re-create and re-work existing material.
Buzznet is a rather radical example, mainly because CC Attribution is a radical choice for a default licensing scheme. As a result of a bit of investigation into the site’s usage, I found out that a Buzznet user does not receive any information about licensing conditions either upon signing up, or during the uploading of content. The licence badge displayed alongside uploaded photos also lacks licensing metadata. And though licensing options can be changed in the ‘Options’ menu, one has to be hard pressed to click an option that states “Licensing. Change default License (Attribution)”.
I use Buzznet only as an example. It is a site endorsed in a way by Creative Commons, as the CC licensing engine recommends Buzznet as a possible space for hosting content. And it is a platform where potentially thousands of works might be incorrectly licenced. I expect that other sites that serve as massive platforms for hosting content also do not provide proper or clear CC licensing. Even when everything is formally correct, it is easy to provide information that is insufficient or unclear. For example, I wonder how many people understand Google’s advanced search condition titled “Return results that are not filtered by license”.
Creative what?
All this would not be a big deal if not for evidence that a lot of people just do not understand Creative Commons. I often feel this way while chatting to people and explaining what CC is all about. If copyright is a difficult subject, than with CC licensing this difficulty is squared. I’ve talked with copyright lawyers with years of experience, who just couldn’t grasp the concept of the licences, and a musician who believed that he would obtain protection of his works solely by using the CC logo (just the logo, the graphical symbol of two C’s in a circle). I’ve dealt with many cases in which well-meaning people simply didn’t ‘get it’, the most common error, I think, is making a statement about CC licensing without choosing and mentioning a particular licence.
The CC team and community are doing a great job promoting open licensing. Numbers showing the rapid growth of CC-licenced works in recent years, are the best proof of this effort. But I fear that behind these statistics hides a large number of people who use licences without truly understanding their meaning or implication.
CC evangelists who are extremely knowledgeable in the matter, might be seriously underestimating the extent to which open licensing is a difficult concept to grasp. My impression is that a lot of people understand the idea behind CC licensing only vaguely and think in terms of simple keywords like “Creative Commons” or “open licensing” - while those well-versed in CC discuss nuances such as borderline cases of non-commercial use. I also believe that the decisions made by licensors are often far from optimal, which again suggests that they simply do not understand the choices offered to them.
With the goal of “getting rid of legal intermediaries”, we are, as a result, requiring that average CC users become quasi-lawyers themselves. In a way, users refuse to do this - for instance by using licences in a fuzzy manner, and in the process ignoring much of the available resources and information - or not understanding it. For some reason content-sharing sites do not inform their users extensively about Creative Commons - such information is ‘difficult’ and ‘boring’.
Hip to be CC
I believe that this problem can only be solved through education. We need new materials that do not just promote CC, the way the short promotional videos do, but to teach about the licenses and their implications: through activities, examples, interactive licensing walkthroughs and so on. People should not just know about CC, but be knowledgeable about it.
The alternative is that we might reach a point where the CC logo is commonly recognized, if not outright hip - but the pool of free content is spoiled through improper licensing of works.
Photograph: Getting creative with CC, one of the winners of the CC Swag contest, by Franz Patzig, CC BY 2.O