Creative Commons: Artists Giving Back

      by Billy Mabray  May 2004

Have you ever made a personal Web page or a greeting card and needed a certain picture that wasn’t in your clip art? You do a search on the Internet and find just the right image. As you right-click and choose Save As, you hear a nagging voice in the back of your head:

You don’t have permission to use this.

But just for this little project, they won’t mind.

You don’t have permission.

I’m not selling it or anything.

No permission.

Fine! I’ll keep looking.

In reality, the artist might have been happy you were using their work, especially if you gave them credit for it. Unfortunately, you had no way of knowing that.

It wasn’t always that way. Before 1976, any work that did not have the familiar copyright symbol © automatically passed into the public domain. You knew immediately whether a work could be used because the creator had to make a conscious decision whether or not to copyright the work. Legislation in 1976 and 1988, however, changed all that: Works were automatically copyrighted as soon as they were created, whether or not the © symbol was applied. An artist might not mind if you used his work for non-commercial projects, but without getting permission directly from him, you had no way of knowing that.

A non-profit organization is working to change that. The Creative Commons, founded in 2002, provides an easy way for creators of artistic works to specify that certain uses of their work are permitted. For example, a musician might allow his song to be re-mixed by another artist, as long as they get credit and the new work is not sold for profit. He would release his work under an Attribution-NonCommercial License. Or, an author might want to allow others to write their own stories based on the characters and places in the author’s novel, as long as the derivative works are released under a similar license. They would choose a ShareAlike License. Other artists would see these licenses and know exactly what permissions they have.

Choosing a license is as simple as answering a few questions on a Web page. The questions cover how you want your work to be used. You are then presented with an appropriate license and information on how to use it. The licenses offered by Creative Commons have been reviewed by their lawyers and are completely legal. They offer easy-to-read versions that explain what may be done with the work. They even provide a special code you can put on your Web site that will allow software to find your work and categorize it based on the licensing.

Why would an artist choose to do this? Certainly, companies like Disney or artists like Britney Spears have no motivation to provide additional rights to their works. For many struggling artists, however, the exposure they can get through others using their work is more valuable than any licensing fee they can charge. Many amateurs take photographs or draw pictures they have no intention of profiting from. They can release those works under a Creative Commons license to give back to the Internet community. Also, Web and software developers often create bits of code they need for their work, but not necessarily to sell. By making that code freely available, they can help others learn, or save someone from having to reinvent the wheel. At the same time, they gain a reputation as a competent programmer.

The next time you are looking for that one certain picture, I recommend you start at http://creativecommons.org. And, the next time you put up an online photo gallery, consider whether you need “All Rights Reserved” or just “Some Rights Reserved.”

Billy Mabray and his wife, Angela, own Smart Goat, a local software
development and web design business.  They are members of the OKCPCUG. Comments or questions on the article are welcome and can be addressed to Billy Mabray.