Dr Paul Miller, Director of the Common Information Environment explores how the Creative Commons licensing system could be deployed by public sector organisations to support the sharing and re-use of their digital resources.
Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) is attracting a lot of interest in the creative industries, but the broader public sector has been slower to recognise the potential benefits of a Creative Commons-like approach. Creative Commons appears, despite the doom-mongering of some studio and record company executives, to offer artists an additional way in which to protect some of their rights whilst encouraging sharing and re-use of their works. So what is the Creative Commons, and might it have anything to offer those public sector bodies that routinely seek to make content available online for use and re-use by members of the public?
Creative Commons began in the United States in 2001, intending to offer a middle ground between restricting the use and re-use of intellectual property (songs, films, books, photographs, etc) through the application of "All Rights Reserved" copyright statements, and the opposite extreme of placing work into the public domain where anyone coming across it would be free to do almost whatever they wished with or to it. Those behind Creative Commons believed that many creators of intellectual property would actually be quite happy to have their work used and re-used in a range of ways, without potential users having to contact the creator, their agent or lawyer, in order to formally request permission, and without giving up all of their rights over the work by assigning it to the public domain. With the Yahoo! search engine (search.yahoo.com/cc/) now indexing millions of Creative Commons-licensed works, it would appear that they might have been right.
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If you want to encourage use and re-use of your online content, Creative Commons might be for you
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Despite the negative press that Creative Commons has received from some quarters, alleging that creators of content throw away all of their rights – and their ability to make money from their work – by licensing with a Creative Commons licence, this is simply not true. If you are placing content online that you want others to use without having to ask permission first, then Creative Commons might be for you. Where you wish to tightly control dissemination, or to charge for every download, then there are better licences.
There are currently six different Creative Commons licences to choose from (creativecommons.org/license/). Each requires that the creator of the original content (you) be acknowledged, and includes certain other common clauses. The licences then differ in terms of the extra things that a potential user is granted permission to do. One licence, for example, prohibits commercial exploitation of your work, whilst others permit it.
In each case, the licence includes a human-readable form (complete with reasonably intuitive symbols to make it clear what is and is not permitted under this licence), a longer legal text, and a snippet of machine-readable code that will enable Creative Commons-aware search engines such as Yahoo!'s to index licensed content more easily.
In each case, too, the licences make it clear that they are non-exclusive; "Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder". In other words, even if your photograph is made available online with a licence that prohibits commercial exploitation, there is nothing to prevent someone from contacting you and coming to a separate arrangement (possibly including payment) to include that photograph in a book they wish to publish.
The original licences are expressed in terms of US law, and there is an active global effort to translate these to meet the requirements of different legal jurisdictions, whilst ensuring that content licensed in one country may still be used in another. In the UK, a team from the University of Oxford led efforts to modify the licences to conform with English and Welsh law. A group in Edinburgh is putting the finishing touches to the Scots Law translation, and hopes to release this very soon.
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Creative Commons licences could benefit a wide range of public sector initiatives
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Creative Commons licences are currently being widely used by individual artists around the world, but their use by organisations is less well understood. In the UK, think tank Demos releases their publications online with a Creative Commons licence, and the Creative Archive (creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/) licence is heavily influenced by Creative Commons. It seems likely that a wide range of public sector initiatives might also benefit from the use of these licences, especially in cases where funding has specifically been awarded in order to place material online for use and re-use. One example of this might be the material digitised with Lottery funding under the New Opportunities Fund's (NOF – now the Big Lottery Fund) Digitisation Programme (www.enrichuk.net). £50,000,000 was spent creating 150 web sites, each containing a wealth of broadly educational material including video, audio, maps, and photographs. Each of these sites actively encourages use and re-use of their material, and each makes it available with a reasonably permissive set of Terms and Conditions. These terms are, however, all subtly different, they are written by lawyers, and they place an unnecessary barrier in the way of someone wishing to extract content from more than one site.
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Shared licenses could reduce project costs and drive take-up of content
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Amongst members of the UK public sector's Common Information Environment (CIE) group, there was a belief that a shared licence or set of licences might reduce individual project costs, increase visibility and drive up the use of the wealth of content currently being placed online through programmes such as NOF's and others. They therefore commissioned a study over the summer in order to gain a better understanding of the potential for Creative Commons licenses to clarify and simplify the process of making publicly funded digital resources available for re-use. CIE members Becta, the British Library, DfES, JISC, and MLA provided funding, and the contract was awarded to Intrallect Ltd and the Arts & Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property & Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh.
This study will be finished in September, and will then be available for download from the CIE web site at www.common-info.org.uk later in the month.
The CIE is a collaborative activity involving a growing number of public sector bodies across the United Kingdom. Members currently include Becta, the British Library, the Cabinet Office's e-Government Unit, Culture Online, the Department for Education & Skills (DfES), English Heritage, the e-Science Core Programme, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), The National Archives, the National Health Service's National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH), the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Library & Information Council (SLIC) and UKOLN.
For more about the CIE's work, visit its website at www.common-info.org.uk.
To contact Dr Miller, email: p.miller@jisc.ac.uk or tel. 07779 669542.
