52
Linux Format
March 2009
The tragedy of the commons
C
reative Commons (CC) resources are allaround us, and continue to multiply by the day.You can find tons of CC texts, web pages, graphics, pictures, audio and video clipsthrough the advanced search functions of Flickr orGoogle. Barack Obama’s change.gov website uses CC,showing that even the president of the USA knows whatwe’re talking about here. That’s cool, but for those of uswho need enlightening, what is the Creative Commons?
Originally, the word ‘commons’ indicated those elementsof the environment, like land, seas, rivers and air, that peopleowned, used and enjoyed together. Today there are alsocultural commons including art and historical landmarks,service-related commons (public health, education ormanagement of drinkable water) and scientific commons,like the knowledge collated by the Human Genome Project. Amore detailed definition can be found at the CommonsInstitute (
www.mercury.org.au/tci home.htm
).The Creative Commons (
http://creativecommons.org
)is an international movement started by Stanford lawprofessor Lawrence Lessig to deal with all those creativeworks protected by copyright law, including text, audio,pictures and video of any subject, in any format. CCencourages authors to put their works into a commons,where they and everybody else can use, copy, remix andredistribute everything, thanks to copyright terms that aremuch more permissive than those loved by big theentertainment corporations. To make this possible, CreativeCommons provides several licences that authors can use toexpress how other people are allowed copy or redistributethose works, use them for derivative works, and make moneyfrom them without asking permission or paying royalties tothe author.
A tour in CC land
There are a couple of things you need to have clear about CCbefore you read on. The first is that the rights grantedthrough CC licencing can only be in addition to those alreadypresent in copyright law, like fair use or fair dealing. Thesecond is that you can apply CC licences only to your own,original work; in other words, you can’t legally incorporatesomebody else’s copyrighted work into your own becauseyou want to distribute the result under a CC licence.Is Creative Commons here to stay, or is it just anotherpassing fad invented by interweb hippies? Is it, like the worldwide web in its beginnings, still restricted to the English-speaking world? Are people outside the anglosphere usingCC, and if so, how?
The Creative Commons is full of potential for artistseverywhere – so why is most of it untapped?Perhaps
Marco Fioretti
can explain…
The tragedy ofthe commons
C
C
LXF116.feature2 5220/1/09 10:28:58 am
March 2009
Linux Format
53
The tragedy of the commons
A
t first glance, the CC ecosystem is alive andflourishing. The official showcase for the project is at
http://creativecommons.org/commoners
, butthere is already more CC content than you can shake a stickat at portals such as DeviantArt, YouTube, Instructables.comand the online bookstore Lulu.Mediacow (
http://mediacow.tv
) is an internet videocommunity that makes it easy for social activists to produceand share their own news reports and documentaries underCC licences. In a similar vein, Daniel Yucra, free softwareactivist and coordinator of the
SomosLibres.org
communitytold us that CC is increasingly popular in Peru, “not only for…teaching documents or artistic works: several newspapersand news websites, like
www.surnoticias.com
, regularly useCC licensing”.
It’s educational
When it comes to education, there are already many teachersand experts worldwide trying to build a really open system fortextbooks and other educational material. The biggest CCsuccess in this field, at least for content in English, is probablythe Connexions portal (
http://cnx.org
). One of its morepopular authors is Catherine Schmidt-Jones, whose textbook,
Basic Music Theory
, has so far been viewed seven milliontimes (
http://cnx. org/content/col10363/latest
). Anotherpopular portalof the same kind is
www.opentextbook.org
.South Africa andCalifornia also havetheir own programmes(
www.nongnu.org/fhsst
and
www.opensourcetext.org
respectively) to bring downthe enormous cost of textbooks. In Italy, the Departmentfor Innovation and Technology of the Ministry of PublicAdministration has recently launched a website at
www.innovascuola.gov.it
to explain to teachers andstudents how to create CC learning material and publish itinside an online open digital library. The National University ofCordoba, Argentina, has its own OpenCourseWare initiative(
http://ocw.unc.edu.ar
), which is based on CreativeCommons, and the same is true for other Latin AmericaNGOs, like
www.gleducar.org.ar
or the ‘Self’ project of theVia Libre Foundation (
www.vialibre.org.ar/proyectos/self
)whose main mission is to spread free software tools andvalues in schools.Creative Commons fever has spread to all types of artisticexpression and design. The SomeRightsReserved shop fromthe UK cooperative KithKin (
www.kith-kin.co.uk/shop
)features CC products as diverse as design projects, musicand instruction manualsfor those wishing todemonstrate outside thePalace of Westminster.Gianluca Bernardo,singer and guitarist withthe Italian band Rein(
www.rein99.it
), told us that, in order to only use CC licences,the band cancelled its subscription to the Italian royaltycollection agency. Gianluca is also a member of the PopularFront for Free Music (
www.fpml.it
), a group of artists formedabout four years ago whose guidelines are cooperation andsharing. Their main achievement so far is the CC-licensed
Liberalarte!
music collection (
http://linux-club.org/node/2949
) which at time of writing consists of four CDsfeaturing dozens of musicians.Also in a musical vein, a great amount of Braziliancontemporary music is simply produced outside the normalstudio system. In the city of Belém, for example, ‘tecno-brega’
The
Basic Music Theory
textbookat Connexionshas had sevenmillion readers.
“At first glance, the CreativeCommons ecosystem isalive and flourishing.”
The
Collaborative Statistics
textbook, one of the newestCC titles from Connexions.The mythical Maltese Tiger, seen here in its made-up blue glory thanks to the work of Guiam and Creative Commons.
Creative Commons: the case in favour
LXF116.feature2 5320/1/09 10:29:0 am
54
Linux Format
March 2009
The tragedy of the commons
Creative Commons: the case against
GFDL vs CC
DeviantArtalso contains CCinstructions likethis one fromPsycho_stress,but if you needCC instructions you’d better visitwebsites likeInstructables.com.
“No system that dealswith human creativity cankeep everybody happy.”
N
o system to deal with human creativity can keepeverybody happy all the time, and CreativeCommons is no exception. In spite of all thesuccesses we’ve mentioned so far, many people all over theworld dislike it. The most common criticism is that CCdoesn’t fight copyright, it just puts a nice, much friendlier faceon it. CC leaves unchallenged the concept that property rightson creative works are a good thing, and unfairly favours thecreators of culture over the consumers, as only authorsdecide what others can do with their work. Another commonobjection is that there are too many Creative Commonslicences, which creates confusion and even serves to limit thefree circulation of content (as in the Wikipedia case, below).Some people also worry that, since CC makes no distinctionbetween alternative file formats of the same digital work, onecould grab high-quality CC-licensed multimedia audio orvideo, mix them and only release for free a version in somelossy format.Some people openly fear Creative Commons. Moreexactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC whohad never thought of copyrighting their works before, theymay simply fall in love with the concept of making moneythrough full copyright and stick to it. Last but not least, themajority of today’s CC-licensed works are only availableonline, making them irrelevant in places where fast internetaccess is absent or too expensive.Priscilla Maliwichi, a computer technician and free softwareactivist at the University of Malawi, told us that “in Malawi, wedon’t have a Creative Commons movement, and personally, Iam not interested in starting one. I do know, however, that inSouth Africa this movement is very hot, and I imagine thatSouth African Creative Commons laws and practices mayeasily suit the Malawian context with just a few changes”.Mexico has a national Creative Commons website(
http://creativecommons.org.mx
) but, says Debiandeveloper Gunnar Wolf “my impression is that there is verylittle done in Mexico about this. A couple of years ago, a groupof lawyers who are sympathetic to CC translated and adaptedthe CC licences, but without particular results so far”.
What does the rest of the world think?
We also got several confirmations of how weird andpotentially risky it can be to preach CC outside westerncountries when we spoke to Carolina Botero and Lila Pagola,two members of the CC communities in Colombia andArgentina. Carolina told us that that “countries like Colombiahave international commitments that oblige us to followinternational IP laws, and our official institutions are highlydependant on this influence. In this context, proposing CClicences is a good idea, especially within educational,scientific or artistic institutions. There is already a nationalrepository for educational resources, and CC is used by ourBiodiversity Information System (
www.siac.net.co
). Socialpractices, however, are an entirely different matter (evenignoring, for simplicity, indigenous communities, which havean altogether different concept of property). Initially, manyauthors and artists just don’t understand why they wouldneed something like CC. However, when we explain the legalconcept, most of the time those people realise what they cando about control and making money and eventually go for fullcopyright, instead of the ‘open’ solution.Lila told us almost the same things about Argentina:“Around here, advocating CC implies explaining howmusic parties attract thousands of people every weekend,and live recordings are burned on to CDs after each party asadvertising material to promote the next one: in such acontext, you don’t really need to bother with CC or any otherform of copyright.CC is, instead, an important part of the Canto Livremovement (
www.direitorio.fgv.br/cts
), created after an ideaof BrazilianmusicianGilberto Gil, whois also Brazil’sMinister forCulture. CantoLivre, which isPortuguese for‘free (as in free jazz) singing’, is a certified P2P infrastructurethat should give all Brazilian music, from tecno-brega to funk,carioca and forrò, a forum for sharing, remixing, collectivecreation and intellectual generosity.
Until recently, the single biggest product ofthe free culture movement – Wikipedia –was licensed under the GNU FreeDocumentation Licence (GFDL). Sadly theGFDL, which was conceived almostexclusively for technical documentation,did “not work well (and in some cases, atall) for certain important kinds of culture”,as Lawrence Lessig puts it. The resultingparadox was ugly and embarrassing: theencyclopaedia that everybody can freelyedit and reuse couldn’t exchange contentwith other works created just to be freelyshared and reused.Luckily on3 November2008, the FreeSoftwareFoundationreleased a newversion of GFDLthat permitscertain wikis tobe relicensedunder one CC licence, as long as therelicensing is completed by 1 August 2009.That means that Wikipedia may finallybecome interoperable with other projects.
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