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Share ItIn today's new media economy, more and more people are looking to use and share their own and other people's creative stuff - safely and legally. So we've created a new section called Share It to give you the lowdown on Creative Commons and Creative Archive Licences, open source, copyleft and places to go where you can use other people's content to create new content of your own. Creative Commons: Read about what Creative Commons is, and how it is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. Find out about choosing a licence, plus download/save sample creative commons licences for use if publishing text only. Plus, read our Creative Commons Factsheet and the ideas interview with Lawrence Lessig, the man behind Creative Commons. And discover how to find work licensed under Creative Commons to use in your own work. Creative Archive: The Creative Archive is a BBC led initiative to provide access to public service audio and video archives in such a way as to allow the British public to find, share, watch, listen and re-use the archive as a fuel for their own creative endeavours. We explore what the Creative Archive is and hopes to achieve and what the licence rules are. Copyleft: Find out all you need to know about Copyleft (as opposed to Copyright) and how in a non-legal sense it is the opposite of copyright (so every person who receives a copy or derived version of a work can use, modify, and redistribute the work and derived versions of it). Open Source: Find out about open source, why it was created and what it could mean to you. How the basic idea of open source, helps improve things via sharing. Because, when programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. Useful Links: Browse the Share It section in the Own-it Web Directory. Find links to sites relevant to creative commons, creative archive licences, open source, copyleft and places to find or share creative works. =================================================== Creative Commons
What Is Creative Commons? Click here to download our Creative Commons Factsheet. The copyright process is free, and clicking the big Publish button on the opening page will step you through the procedure. Alternatively, if you wish to find works that are protected under Creative Commons licenses to use in your own creative works, you can click the big Find button on the opening page. This enables you to browse directories of licensed works and search for Creative Commons audio, images, text, video, and other formats that are free to share online. The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. The aim is to counter effects of the dominant and restrictive permission culture pervading modern society which strengthens content distributor's monopolies on cultural products like popular music and cinema. Click here to download Prodromos Tsiavos & Mark Latonero's paper Gowers Review of Intellectual Property in the UK: Shaping the Digital Future =================================================== Creative Commons Licenses Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request. SAMPLE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCES (for text under England & Wales jurisdiction) If you want to allow commercial use of your work:
If you don't want to allow commercial use of your work:
If you want a creative commons licence for jurisdiction in another country, or in another format other than text (eg. audio, video, image, interactive, other), or need a sampling licence, please visit the Creative Commons Choose A Licence section and select your own criteria. More examples are available on the Creative Commons examples page. Also note that every license carries with it a full set of other rights in addition to the allowances specifically made here. Taking A License When you've made your choices, you'll get the appropriate license expressed in three ways:
Using A License You should then include a Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" button on your site, near your work. Help and tips on doing this are covered here. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the license terms. If you find that your license is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement. =================================================== Creative Commons: The Ideas Interview - Lawrence Lessig
The man behind Creative Commons tells John Sutherland why the copyright system has to change It is against this anarchic backdrop that Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford, proposed his Creative Commons initiative - copyright for the 'age of the electronic frontier'. Creative Commons may not prevent theft, but it does allow owners to define the terms on which their content can be used. It also makes it harder for offenders to claim that they ignore the rules because they don't understand them. Creative Commons, the non-profit organisation that administers the licences, is expanding rapidly and internationally. 'We've seen a pretty substantial lift,' says Lessig. 'We've being going for three years. In the first year we recorded about one million take-ups for our licences. In the next year that went up to 4m. Between December 2004 and December 2005, the number went from about 4m to 45m.' Impressive figures. But does Lessig really think he can 'tame' the internet by controlling the rustlers of intellectual property? 'Well,' he replies, 'that's not really our objective. What Creative Commons sets out to do is to make it easier for artists and authors to mark their content with the permission they intend it to carry and to invite people to use that work consistent with the freedoms given and the rights reserved.' Don't traditional copyright arrangements have this flexibility? 'In principle they do. The problem is that the last thing you want to do when you go surfing the internet is to read a copyright licence. So if everyone attached their own copyright licence document to their content you would have freedoms and restrictions asserted but basically useless because the cost of understanding them would be too high. What we do at Creative Commons is to standardise around a simple set of six core licences the freedoms that our research has found most important, and then allow people to signal those freedoms in a way that is understandable and - most importantly - machine-readable. Engines like Yahoo and Google now offer portals that search the internet and filter on the basis of Creative Commons licences. You can ask, for example, 'Show me all the pictures of the Empire State Building (less King Kong) that are available for non-commercial use' and the search engine will return images based on those criteria.' What about enforceability? The effectiveness of copyright law was that it had the muscle of the state and a system of penalties behind it. Is Creative Commons entirely voluntary? 'We depend on exactly the same kinds of enforceability. A Creative Commons licence rests upon someone's copyright. So if an author decides that he's happy to have his book distributed freely on the net he puts his book up there resting on his existing copyright and licenses certain uses of it for free. If somebody violates that licence, then that person is a copyright infringer and the same remedies apply that protect, for instance, Microsoft when people pirate their products. 'But the thing that I am most worried about is that the internet will continue responding to piracy in the same way as has happened with movies and music - by developing sophisticated technologies that can lock content down so that people can't copy or distribute it without the permission of the copyright owner. That would essentially destroy the creative potential of the internet to be a source of cultural remixing, mash-ups and re-creativity.' Where, then, does Creative Commons stand on the question of public domain - that vast archive of material communally owned by the people? 'Creative Commons content is not technically in the public domain because it's all copyrighted content that's licenced. But it is effectively, at least for some uses, in the public domain. A creator, or a teacher, or a student who wants access to content doesn't have to worry about being a law violator just because they want to access, or use, or distribute remixed content. And the critical thing is that we do this by getting agreement from the creators. We're not taking anything from anyone. So is public domain a dead duck? 'The public domain has been so important historically in fuelling the spread of culture and keeping competition up and prices down. But copyright terms have recently been extended so repeatedly - Europe is now adopting a life plus 70 [years] term - and the US has extended the terms of existing copyrights 11 times in 40 years. So there's this ever-increasing pressure to expand the term of copyright. That's great for the 1% of creative work that continues to have any commercial life more than 10 years after its initial publication. But for the other 99%, all the copyright system does is lock it down and make it inaccessible.' Commentators see a crisis for newspapers in the next few years, as advertising is siphoned off and more and more (particularly younger) people use the internet as their first-call news providers. Attempts at pay-per-view by press websites invariably precipitate a slump in usage. What do Lessig and Creative Commons see as the future of the fourth estate? 'The competition is not just rival advertising outlets, but amateur journalists - bloggers,' he says. 'The real challenge for newspapers is whether they want to stay relevant. The blogosphere will continue to be free, searchable by any engine. Newspapers will have to decide whether they want to hide their work behind passwords and pay-to-search archives, so nobody can see them, or whether they want to continue to be accessible and for their content to have some value. 'No one knows what these things will look like in a few years,' he admits. 'What we have to remember is that we've seen some pretty massive changes in communications technology in the past 150 years. And no older technology ever gets eliminated by the newer. The new technology merely changes the significance of the older. So there's still radio, even though there's TV. There's still TV, even though there's the internet. And there will still be newspapers, even if the shape and the form of them changes dramatically' Lawrence Lessig's website is at Lessig.org/blog/. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 =================================================== Creative Archive Licence
Creative Archive Licence Group What Is the Creative Archive Licence? The BBC Creative Archive, first announced by former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke at the Edinburgh Television Festival in August 2003, released its first content in August 2005, will allow people to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, manipulate and share them, so making the BBC's archives more accessible to licence fee payers. So, under the licence, the public can download moving images, audio and stills and rework them creatively for non-commercial use. Membership of the Creative Archive Licence Group is available to major national collections, broadcasters and commercial organisations who wish to share content with the public on the same terms, are committed to the process of improving the service to the user and can meet monthly. See creativearchive.bbc.co.uk What Are The Rules Of Use? Basically, there are five main rules that you need to know and agree to in order to be able to use the Creative Archive material. Please note that this summary is not a replacement for the Creative Archive Licence but an effort to introduce the key concepts. 1. Non-commercial 3. Crediting (Attribution) 4. No Endorsement and No derogatory use 5. UK =================================================== BBC, Channel 4, British Film Institute and OU issue call to action for the Creative Archive Licence Media and arts organisations, universities and libraries have been urged to join an innovative new scheme designed to give the public access to footage and sound from some of the largest film, television and radio archives in the UK, as well as specially commissioned material. The BBC, Channel 4, the British Film Institute (bfi) and the Open University (OU) have launched the Creative Archive Licence, which will pave the way for legal downloading of selected material from the internet. At a launch seminar in London, the four partners in the Creative Archive Licence Group issued a call for action for other organisations to join them. The Creative Archive Licence gives a new generation of media users legal access to material which they can use to express their creativity and share their knowledge – all completely free of charge. The Creative Archive Licence allows people to download and use footage and audio for non-commercial purposes. Each user agrees to abide by the licence conditions before gaining access to any of the available material. The Creative Archive Licence scheme aims to:
The Creative Archive Licence is inspired by the Creative Commons system, a flexible copyright arrangement pioneered in the US to stimulate creativity. The four members of the Creative Archive Licence Group hope it will represent a major watershed in public access to film, TV, radio archives and digital content for personal use, and today issued a major call to action. Each of the partners in the Creative Archive Licence Group will this year launch pilot schemes to make material for download available under the Licence. Visit creativearchive.bbc.co.uk =================================================== Copyleft
What Is Copyleft? Copyleft describes a group of licenses applied to works such as softwarem documents, music, and art. Whereas copyright law is seen by the original proponents of copyleft as a way to restrict the right to make and redistribute copies of a particular work, a copyleft license uses copyright law in order to ensure that every person who receives a copy or derived version of a work can use, modify, and also redistribute both the work, and derived versions of the work. Thus, in a non-legal sense, copyleft is the opposite of copyright. Authors and developers use copyleft with their work to include others in improving and elaborating the work as a continuing process. Applying Copyleft Common practice for using copyleft is to codify the copying terms for a work with a license. Any such license typically gives each person possessing a copy of the work the same freedoms as the author, including:
These freedoms do not ensure that a derivative work will be distributed under the same liberal terms. In order for the work to be truly copyleft, the license has to ensure that the author of a derived work can only distribute such works under the same or equivalent license. In addition to restrictions on copying, some other possible impediments copyleft licences aim to address include:
Copyleft licenses necessarily make creative use of relevant rules and laws. For example, when using copyright law, those who contribute to a work under copyleft usually must gain, defer or assign copyright holder status. By submitting the copyright of their contributions under a copyleft license, they deliberately give up some of the rights that normally follow from copyright, including the right to be the unique distributor of copies of the work. Copyleft and Copyright article - click here Copyleft software article - click here =================================================== Open Source
Open Source What Is Open Source? Open source denotes that the origins of a product are publicly accessible in part or in whole. It describes general practices in production and development which promote access to the end product's sources. It is regarded by some as a philosophy and by others a pragmatic methodology. Developers and producers had used many different phrases and jargon words before open source became widely adopted, as the early Internet years provided a rapid convergence of socially diverse production models. With the revolutionary increase in interactive communities and their direct involvement with the Internet, open-source software became the most prominent face of open source. Even though the Internet started in 1969 with open standards like RFCs, it wasn't until 1998 that open source became a label applied to software to denote the same collaborative effort which began the Internet. The open source model allows for the concurrent use of different agendas and approaches in production, and it contrasts with more isolated models. According to The Open Source Initiative: "The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. The Open Source Definition IntroductionOpen source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: 1. Free Redistribution 2. Source Code 3. Derived Works 4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor 7. Distribution of License 8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software *10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral Origins: Bruce Perens wrote the first draft of this document as "The Debian Free Software Guidelines", and refined it using the comments of the Debian developers in a month-long e-mail conference in June, 1997. He removed the Debian-specific references from the document to create the "Open Source Definition." Copyright © 2006 by the Open Source Initiative Some more useful sites worth looking at to learn more about Open Source include: Find more in our directory. =================================================== Useful Links
Click here to browse the Own-it directory of websites that will help you share your work or find work that others are sharing. Access the Share It web directory here. |
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