Utente:Giacomovincenzi/Sandbox

The Unrepeating History of Creative Commons

Surfing the Net

Creative Commons' history begins with the possibilities the Internet provided to users and citizens all over the world. Through the Internet, people can communicate and share content instantly, at basically no cost, with thousands of people, without any limit of space. On the web, creativity can surf at an unprecedented speed, propelled by the winds of new technological affordances.

The Walls of Copyright

The law enforces restrictions to the copying and sharing of intellectual content by providing "copyright" to the creator(s) of any work of intellect. Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights to a creator, so that the creator has the ability to prevent others from copying and adapting the work for a limited time.

An inevitable Clash

Therefore, copyright laws all around the world are ontologically alternative, or even in contrast, with the capabilities to copy, adapt and distribute a piece of creative content - a 'resource' - through the Internet. Towards the end of the millennium, this was the kind of tension some artists, publishers and law scholars would perceive.

Here comes the Sonny

Queen Anne invented the modern notion of copyright as the right of an author to copy and to have sole control over the printing and reprinting of his/her books. The so-called Statute of Anne introduced a temporary limit of 14 years to this right. An author who survived until the copyright expired would be granted an additional 14-year term, and when that ran out, the works would enter the public domain. Since then, disputes of the legislators all across the world have revolved around the duration of the copyright. The Congress of the United States has been extending it several times during the 20th century. The last time was by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act(CTEA), who added 20 more years to the 50 granted to the copyright holder after the death of the creator of the work.

The Web's Publisher Oddity

Since the Sonny Bono Act affected both new and existing works, those who were relying on the Web's affordances to share and distribute cultural products found themselves unable to do so for a large amount of content, who was prevented from entering the public domain anymore. Eric Eldred was an Internet publisher, who decided to question the constitutionality of this law. Supported by Stanford's law professor Lawrence Lessig, on January 11, 1999 he filed a complaint whose arguments were rejected on October 28, 1999. The plaintiffs appealed the decision first to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit then to the Supreme Court, in the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision. Both courts upheld the constitutionality of the law, acknowledging the authority of the Congress to set the time limit for copyright at its discretion.

A Turning Tide

Yet, a pebble had been dropped into the vast pond of the Web, and it was already making waves. Since 1999, Lessig had formed a collection of people to help fight the case, which was named the Copyrights Commons. In 2001 Eric Saltzman suggested the name 'Creative Commons' for the movement and the first set of Creative Commons (CC) licences were issued on 16 December, 2002, inspired in part by the GNU General Public Licence. CC is already a threefold creature: a legal toolkit (as a suite of licenses), a non-profit organisation (established in a basement of Stanford Law School) and a global movement, reaching out to everyone who had the same interests.

You are Free

The CC licences is a set of free, public licences that allow creators to keep their copyrights while sharing their works on more flexible terms than the default "all rights reserved". Copyright is automatic, whether an author wants it or not; nonetheless, many creators might not need to reserve for themselves all the rights. Therefore, the licences provided are "open", insofar as they combine the existing copyright law with an easy way to distribute and allow remixing of creative content.

Where are we Now?

Creative Commons estimated that over 2.5 billion pieces of content were CC Licensed by the end of 2023. Anyone can get involved in Creative Commons. As a user, you can rely on what the licences allow: copy content, adapt it for your own purposes, and share it again. As a creator, you can apply to your work the licence that best suits your needs, making it easier for others to find it and, in turn, reuse, adapt, and redistribute it.

To get in touch and participate with the CC community, it's possible to join the CC Global Network Zulip chat, which hosts different thematic platforms, or subscribe to the official community newsletter.

Click and listen to the Soundcloud playlist of this Wikibook.