0.5 Creative approaches and alternatives  (Page 5/7)

Educational and science commons

Two other divisions of Creative Commons also engage in specialized work:  ccLearn  for open educational resources and  Science Commons  for open access to science.

New creative commons protocols

In addition to the six licenses, Creative Commons has recently developed two new protocols: CC+ and CC0.

CC+  (CC “Plus”) is not a license, but a technology for offering users rights beyond the CC license grant -- for instance commercial rights, or additional warranties.

CC0  (CC “Zero”) is a universal waiver of copyright, neighboring and related rights, and sui generis rights. CC0 thus enables authors to place their works in the public domain. CC0 is sometimes known as the “no rights reserved” option. Under the laws of certain countries, however, it is not possible for an author to grant a blanket waiver of his or her moral rights. Nor can an author waive the rights that others may have relating to the use of a work (for example, the publicity rights that the subject of a photograph may have).

A possible implementation model for digital libraries would be to propose a combination of:

• CC licenses for works created by librarians: abstracts, comments, photographs, maps, other copyrightable elements of the editorial structure;
• CC licenses for works created by patrons: comments, abstracts, critics, blog posts;
• CC0 licenses for databases of public domain works to which the libraries have added potentially copyrightable material.

Implications for authors and for users

Authors considering applying Creative Commons licenses to their creations should consider the following issues:

The licenses are based on copyright law, and are thus applicable only to copyrightable works.

In many countries, collecting societies require their members to assign all of their rights in present and future works to the societies. Thus, members cannot use Creative Commons licenses, even for some of their works or some of their rights.

Many authors do not understand why the two systems are not compatible, especially in the music industry. They would like to license their non-commercial rights for free under a Creative Commons license, and assign the management of their commercial rights to a collecting society. This model is possible for some collecting societies in some countries, such as the United States, the Netherlands or Denmark. But other collecting societies do not use the same legal categories as Creative Commons. For instance, they may not recognize the distinction between commercial and non-commercial uses. In those countries, authors are currently forced to choose one system or the other.

Creative Commons staff and international affiliates have been working with collecting societies in hopes of resolving this incompatibility. Unfortunately, some collecting societies and other copyright stakeholders are skeptical of Creative Commons licenses and are thus reluctant to move forward. Their criticisms of the Creative Commons model include:

• The Creative Commons system does not provide creators a way to collect money; creators thus must organize for themselves a way to charge for activities that fall outside the CC license terms.
• Creative Commons does not track infringements and is not authorized to represent licensors in lawsuits or help them enforce the licenses.
• Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable, and the license grant is perpetual. Authors who employ CC licenses thus cannot later change their minds. They can, of course, cease distributing the works or distribute them under different conditions, but this will not affect the rights associated with the copies that are already in circulation.
• Determining what does and does not constitute a commercial use is a difficult question, and answers may vary among individuals and user communities.
• It is questionable whether jurisdiction-specific licenses, which have been adapted to national legal systems, are really compatible with each other. For instance, some versions of the CC licenses include moral rights or database rights; others do not.