Here is My Blog: Feel Free to Remix

Some rights reserved by A. Diez Herrero

Week 10: Following week 10 tutorial’s exercise, explain why you chose the Creative Commons license that you added to your blog and discuss the relevance (or not) of adding the license.

Following the tutorial this week, it took me a while to decide which Creative Commons license I was going to include in my blog.Ultimately however, I was swayed by the ideas of freedom and open access behind the creation of Creative Commons and decided that the Attribution-ShareAlike license would be the most appropriate license to choose.

The role of the Creative Commons website according to founder Lawrence Lessig is to counter the changes in copyright law which are seen as narrowing access to creative works (Lessig 2004). Recent legal changes to copyright, such as the introduction of the Sony Bonno Copyright Extension Act in 1998 which extended the length of copyright, have created issues in the application and transference of these laws to the medium of the internet (Garcelon, 2009). Following the introduction of these restrictions on copyright, Creative Commons was established in order to regain a sense of freedom of information and ideas on the internet.

Through the introduction of the Creative Commons website, copyright holders (such as myself with this blog) are given the option of choosing a license which enables their creative work to be available for copying and for distribution. These Creative Commons licenses operate by granting voluntary exceptions to their original rights under copyright laws which means that no legislative action is needed (Garcelon, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson, known as the architect of original copyright law in America argued that ideas are the property of the public domain (Vaidhyanathan, 2001). Jefferson believed that it was only the expression of these ideas which should be protected under copyright, rather than the actual ideas themselves. According to Jefferson, “he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light himself without darkening mine” (Katz, 2004). The risk with copyright laws, according to the advocates of organisations such as Creative Commons, is the threat that is posed to ideas existing within the realm of public knowledge. Without this open access to ideas, the creation of new culture works would be restricted and inhibited by the strict constraints surrounding copyright laws.

The founders of Creative Commons aim to recover this sense of freedom, with emphasis placed on freedom of information. Lessig focusses on the concept of non rivalrous property when discussing freedom of ideas. According to Lessig, the realm of ideas consists of non rivalrous sources which are not restrictive in the same way as the realm of reality (Lessig, 2005). Lessig champions the idea of a commons as a “public domain from which anyone can draw without the permission of anyone else” (2005, p. 352).

After reading the terms of the available licenses on the Creative Commons website, I decided to choose the Attribution-ShareAlike license to apply to my blog content. I believe that this license best represents the goal of creative commons to achieve maximum levels of freedom and access to ideas and information on the internet. With this license, readers of my blog will be aware that they can remix, tweak and build upon my blog for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

In relation to benefiting from this content for commercial purposes, one restriction is applied within this license. By adding the Attribution-ShareAlike license to my blog, the user must not only credit me in their new work, but they must also subject their work to the same terms under the Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that whilst they can benefit commercially from either remixing or building upon the content of this blog, they must also allow their content to remain open and free for others to also benefit commercially and tweak and remix their work. I believe that if anyone could find a commercial use for my blog then they must also enable that content to be free and able to be distributed and copied for commercial or non-commercial purposes in the same way that i have allowed. I believe that this license truly represents the interests of Creative Commons and leads the way towards a freely accessible public realm of knowledge and ideas.

REFERENCES

Lessig, L. (2005) ‘Open Code and Open Code Societies’, in Feller, J, Fitzgerald, B, Hissam, S & Lakhani, K (2005) Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, pp.349-360.

Garcelon, M (2009) ‘An Information Commons? Creative Commons and Public Access to Cultural Creations’, New Media & Society, vol.11, mo.8, pp.1307-1326.

Katz, M. (2004) Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley: UC Press.

Vaidhyanathan, S (2004) Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and how it Threatens Creativity. New York and London, New York University Press.