Creative Commons Licenses
Welcome back! What jumped out at you from viewing Twenty Years of Creative Commons (in Sixty Seconds)? One of the things that jumps out at me is that sixty seconds is about how long I can pay attention some days. Hopefully you’ve taken a break and can approach this chapter with energy and renewed curiosity.
Call your imagined project back to mind. We have discussed how the use of OER in this project can increase student access to the experience you are designing and center your expertise. We have remembered that in the United States, copyright is intended to protect creators’ rights over the use and distribution of their work, and that copyright is conferred immediately once the work has taken tangible form. Finally, we took sixty seconds to hear about how some creators have used Creative Commons licenses to communicate their willingness to have others interact with their work. This chapter will share a bit more about what that means.
About Creative Commons Licenses
The Creative Commons licenses layer over existing copyright to give creators a clear, standardized way to grant permission to others to use their work. From the re-user’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license answers the question “What can I do with this?” and provides freedom to re-use, subject to clearly defined conditions. All Creative Commons licenses ensure that creators retain their copyright and get credit for their work, while permitting others to copy and distribute it.
Although the tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible, there are still some things to learn in order to fully understand their mechanics. The licenses are built using a three layer design.
The legal code is the base layer. This contains the “lawyer-readable” terms and conditions that are legally enforceable in court. Take a minute and scan through the legal code of CC BY to see how it is structured. Can you find where the attribution requirements are listed?
The commons deeds are the most well-known layer of the licenses. These are the web pages that lay out the key license terms in so-called “human-readable” terms. The deeds are not legally enforceable but instead summarize the legal code. Take some time to explore the deeds for CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND and identify how they differ. Can you find the links to the legal code from each deed?
The final layer of the license design recognizes that software plays a critical role in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. In order to make it easy for websites and web services to know when a work is available under a Creative Commons license, we provide a “machine readable” version of the license—a summary of the key freedoms granted and obligations imposed written into a format that applications, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand. We developed a standardized way to describe licenses that software can understand called CC Rights Expression Language (CC REL) to accomplis