Creative Commons cited on IPOS website

The CC-SG team (specifically Chung Nian and Giorgos) have had cordial discussions with IPOS previously. Recently the nice folks at IPOS informed us that they’ve provided information about CC at this IPOS webpage, on Ownership & Rights:

http://www.ipos.gov.sg/leftNav/cop/Ownership+and+Rights.htm
[Last accessed: 10 Jun 09]

[Scroll to the bottom of the page]

The text says:

Creative Commons

Some copyright owners across jurisdictions have adopted licences provided by Creative Commons (CC).

CC is a non-profit organisation that provides licences and tools to allow owners of copyright material to designate the conditions (or “attributes”) under which their material may be used worldwide.

CC licences are not an alternative to copyright. In fact, they apply existing copyright law.

Users of CC licensed material are permitted to use the material without the need to further seek explicit permission from the owner, so long as the use conforms to the licence attributes.

Material released under a CC licence is not necessarily in the “public domain”, as the licensor using a CC licence does not have to give up all rights to his/her material.

CC licences are offered to the public at no charge and no registration is required to use a CC licence.

More information on CC licences can be found here.

LINK

[UPDATE 17 Jun 09: Thanks to Michelle Thorne for plugging this, here and here]

Where can I find Creative Commons licensed media> (or “30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media”)

Received this tweet from Kevin Lim:

Kevin’s link brought me to this post (www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/04/30/30-creative-commons-sources) by Sean P Aune. His article annotates “30 of the best resources online for audio, video, images and more for finding just the perfect Creative Commons licensed item for use in your next project”, covering Audio, General Searches, Images, Text, and Videos.

Lots of useful stuff from that article (thanks again, Kevin).

Article: Creative Commons: A License to Share

From International Business Times (25 Mar 09):

In July 2008, Singapore became the 47th country to offer the CC system of licensing to their jurisdiction. Warren Chik, law professor at the Singapore Management University, is a member of the Creative Commons Singapore team that has worked in close collaboration with Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL) to adapt the licenses to Singapore’s jurisdiction. As Chik points out, beneath their easy-to-grasp wording, these licenses actually reflect significant social and technological changes – to say nothing of political – that have been unfolding in recent years…

… In 1710, Britain enacted the Statute of Anne, the first law to formally express such key concepts as copyright (hence intellectual property rights) belonging to the author or creator of a work. Specific time limits for copyright were also introduced after which a work became “public domain”.

… Today, most of the world has extremely strong copyright laws, based on the premise that more intellectual property rights (IPRs) will translate into more creativity. However, present-day technologies such as the Internet and mobile digital networks are redefining and transforming our sense of authorship and copyright. Although the cyberspace may be virtual in a certain sense, lawyers are trying to adapt existing laws to fit the digitised world.

… Critics of IPR protection claim that, like science and technology, culture grows by accretion and therefore depends on a rich and truly public domain…

… This has led to some who argue for a reconsideration of notions of common ownership, what is deemed appropriate for the public domain and how which, in turn, can be more readily applied in electronic transactions, he adds.

… So what is the Creative Commons framework bringing to the on-going debate? “The main basis of the argument against a default position of full copyright protection that the CC movement is seeking to remedy, is that the right of re-use can beget greater overall creativity albeit inspired by the source of an original creation as well as promote the benefits of information sharing without restrictions based on wealth,” says Chik.

The legal basis for this argument is the Utilitarian model –- inspired by the likes of 19th century English philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill — whereby a set of legal rules should maximise the overall benefits to society.

“In the end, there is no clear right or wrong position to be taken and probably no perfect calibration for what is to be protected and what should be shared. But as we have seen, the market and cultural forces will continually seek as optimal a balance as possible between interest parties through the framework and in the context of the law,” says Chik.

Full article, here.

Citation:
Creative Commons: A License to Share – International Business Times -. (n.d.). . Retrieved March 27, 2009, from http://www.ibtimes.com/contents/20090325/creative-commonslicense-share.htm.

Creative Commons – What, How, Why

Here are slides for my presentation at the Creative Crew Singapore meeting on 10 Mar 09. Some people told me the slides were useful in understanding more about CC, so I’m sharing it here:

The PDF copy can be downloaded here (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License. For permissions beyond the scope of this license, please contact RamblingLibrarian@gmail.com).

Singapore licenses are online!

In all the enthusiasm after we finally made it and among the million other things each one of us is involved in we neglected to communicate the merry news on this blog. Yes, after some delay, the Singapore versions of the Creative Commons licenses are now online and available for all Singapore-based authors to use. Just head over to http://creativecommons.org/international/sg/ for an overview of the licenses.

To license your own work (say your blog text or a photo you have taken) under a Singapore-specific Creative Commons license go to http://creativecommons.org/license/ to choose the appropriate license (just make sure you choose “Singapore” as your jurisdiction). After answering a couple of simple questions about the types of uses that you wish to allow, the website will give you some code that you can copy and paste into the webpage where your content lies.

If now you find that this is too complicated because perhaps you don’t know how to enter this code on your webpage or blog, you could just enter manually on your webpage a notice about the license you wish to use for the content hosted on that page (be it pictures, text, music, or anything else) and add a hyperlink to the respective license “deed” (e.g., link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/sg/ if you wish to use the BY license). You’re done! Now a user who visits the webpage will be able to see that you license your content under a specific CC license and will also be able to click on the hyperlink to read the terms and conditions of the license. This way of doing things is not exactly optimal, as you have not included the code that the first method I described above will generate for you. Without that code it will be more difficult for search engines and software tools to automatically identify your content as CC-licensed. So I would suggest using the first method whenever possible. But for a human user it will be all the same. 

No matter what you do, just make sure that before you license your work under a Creative Commons license you understand the terms of the license you are using and make it easy for anyone viewing your page to access that license so they can understand the terms as well. Note that unless you are a legal expert or have a particular fascination with legal documents, you do not need to read the whole license text to understand the license. You only need to read the short and simple license “deed” (such as in the link above), which captures the essence of the license in a few words. If after visiting the links above you are still unsure as to which license to use you may find answers to your questions in the Creative Commons FAQ. 

As a last note: if you are a Singapore-based author/creator there is nothing stopping you from using another country’s license from the Creative Commons website, but it makes all the sense in the world to use the Singapore-specific licenses – these are crafted with a language that is tailored to Singapore law and this will be helpful for local legal experts and courts in case you ever need to take legal action against unlawful uses of your content. So, you’re doing yourself a favor if you use the Singapore-specific Creative Commons licenses (and of course you’re also making those of us who worked on them happy to see the licenses used in practice)!

Finally, it goes without saying that if you read this and you are designing/administering a Singapore-based online community which allows users to post their own content online, you should consider integrating the choice of Singapore CC licenses in your website design, so that whenever users wish to use a CC license your website can give them the option to do this as part of the upload process. Flickr is a good example of implementing this in practice – it allows users to choose a CC license for their uploaded photos and will then automatically add a license notice on the respective pages hosting these photos. It will also allow users to search for photos which are CC-licensed here  or browse through them by license type here.

 

PS. Big thanks to all those who helped finalize the licenses and put them online, including Anil Samtani of NTU, Warren Chik and Ankit Guglani of SMU, and the good folks at Creative Commons San Francisco and Berlin.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig Explains Creative Commons Licensing

Lawrence Lessig (www.lessig.org/blog), founding board member of Creative Commons, explains about Creative Commons licensing in this 2006 video.

He explains that Creative Commons is an easier way (tool and technology) for people to signal how they wish their works to be shared and used. Which is an important point.

I think there’s a common misconception that Creative Commons is about giving up your copyright right. On the contrary, it works hand-in-hand with current copyright law. As Lessig points out early on in the video, Copyright (as we know it today) is “more protection” for that what most people need, when they share works in the Internet.

Learn more in the 8min video:

J.D. Lasica interviews Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig for an 8-minute video in regards to the future of copyright.

Lessig, of course, is the leading light of the participatory culture movement, chairman and co-founder of Creative Commons, and a member of the Ourmedia Advisory Board. His books are “Code,” “The Future of Ideas” and “Free Culture.” Lessig is a Law Professor at Stanford Law School, he’s also the Chairman of Creative Commons.

LINK

What the heck is “Creative Commons” and why would it matter?

In simple terms, Creative Commons matters if you’re creating stuff and putting them on the Internet. And you want a way to protect your intellectual property while encouraging certain uses of them.

Try watching this video (same video here, in better resolution).

Here’s a quote from CreativeCommons.org’s About page:]

“… Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

If you’ve questions or comments about Creative Commons, feel free to leave a comment.