Creative Commons License - Solution Looking for a Problem?

Columnist John C. Dvorak raises several interesting concerns about Creative Commons Initiative.

Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten the already tenuous “fair use” provisos of existing copyright law. This is one of the dumbest initiatives ever put forth by the tech community.

Creative Commons actually seems to be a dangerous system with almost zero benefits to the public, copyright holders, or those of us who would like a return to a shorter-length copyright law.

Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It’s called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I’m a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws. In fact, the suggestion is dangerous, because if someone were sued by the Creative Commons folks over normal fair use and Creative Commons won the suit, then we’d all pay the price, as fair use would be eroded further.

If I write something on my blog, for example, and decide not to cover it with the general copyright notice, I can simply say that it is in the public domain and be done with it. I do not need permission from Creative Commons, nor do I need to mention Creative Commons or anything else. It’s in the public domain by my personally allowing it to be so. This is my right! I don’t need a middleman—a Creative Commons Commissar—to approve my decision. And yet there is this perception that I do.

Years ago, to gain a copyright, you had to fill out a form and send in the material to the Library of Congress. Now you just use the word “copyright,” add your name and a date, and publish it. What could be easier? Apparently simplicity was more than some people could handle, so they invented Creative Commons to add some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism. And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons. Oh, brother!

Source

Personally I haven’t found any practical use of creative commons license that isn’t covered by copyright laws in vogue and so you will not find it on any of my sites. The popular WordPress Plugin (free), which I provide for automatically adding copyright messages to feed items, also comes packaged with a standard copyright message, not Creative Commons variant.