A new licensing plan known as Creative Commons is said to be better suited to the Internet age than many other plans and schemes, and it’s getting a huge boost from rap legend Chuck D, whose Fine Arts Militia posted “No Meaning No” online, encouraged any and everyone to see, copy, mix, sample, mimic, and criticize it, and sat back and enjoyed the creative spark it lit so much they chose to publish their next full album likewise.
“No Meaning No” is one of a reported ten million other such creations, from the film Outfoxed to British Broadcasting Corporation news footage, music by the Beastie Boys, and books by the O’Reilly publishing house, distributed online under the Creative Commons license.
It even has support from a source some might consider surprising, according to published reports: Hilary Rosen, whose former presidency of the Recording Industry Association of America will likely be remembered as the one under which the music trade association launched its thrusting and controversial litigation strategy against peer-to-peer file swapping online.
And Rosen isn’t the only former trade association head who’s shifted from that kind of litigation to this kind of support for such a new licensing scheme: former Motion Picture Association of America chief Jack Valenti.
Above all, however, it seems to be the creators of the works who have the biggest interest in Creative Commons, which is helping more of them warm up to the Internet as an ally rather than an enemy.
The reputed creation of Internet theorist Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons sprang from his belief that incumbent copyright law offers little if any flexibility, and that a solution should be a set of copyright licenses letting artists choose whether to keep some or all rights reserved, letting their work be enjoyed and copied by anyone for any reason and either limiting it to non-commercial use to allow portions to be used.
He founded Creative Commons, he told reporters, with the aim of helping “artists and authors give others the freedom to build upon their creativity -- without calling a lawyer first." Fine Arts Militia bassist Brian Hardgroove called it “good for society (and) good for us and our business, because we get out music out.”
Lessig does worry, however, that extending copyright laws keeps too much work out of the public domain and hampers creativity, particularly since the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 has extended copyrights from 28 to 70 years beyond a creator’s death. He told reporters the Creative Commons goal was creating a body of digital work, “artifacts of culture,” for the public domain, with anyone able to hear or see them.
They’re well on the way. Since the Creative Commons licenses began in the past year, not only music and video but over five hundred Massachussetts Institute of Technology class materials, audio of U.S. Supreme Court arguments since 1950 from the Public Library of Science, and Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom—the first e-copy distribution far outreached its first hardcover run—have been part of the archive.
"There is this weird sense,” Doctorow told an interviewer, “that the Internet is broken because it lets people make easy copies. . . . The Internet is a machine for making copies, and artists need to come to grips with that.” He has. His second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, has been released online with a Creative Commons license.
Creative Commons even has a search engine, whose technology the Mozilla Foundation features in its Firefox Internet browser toolbar along with search kings Google and Yahoo. “The Creative Commons search engine helps companies, educators, and artists find content they can re-use without having to call a lawyer,” said Creative Commons assistant director Neeru Paharia, “and it offers authors and artists who want to share their work a competitive advantage toward having their work discovered online.”
