Creative Commons

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This is what the world will be like if the Creative Commons people get their way.
This is what the world will be like if the Creative Commons people get their way.
This person's organs may be distributed and used freely by anyone!
This person's organs may be distributed and used freely by anyone!
Creative Commons is teh futar.

It is a system of licenses (ie, confusing jargon) to allow other individuals (ie. fucking hippies, liberals, fags, etc.) the ability to use or appropriate (ie. steal, manipulate, fuck with.) your work (stupid memes, animutations, crappy demo tapes, Wikipedia articles) and transform them without having to get your expressed written permission (bad idea). Lawrence Lessig (fucking commie bastard) developed this system to allow a way around the restrictive copyright system (read: the law). Lessig also believes in P2P servers and free exchange of information. He was assassinated in 2006 by the MPAA.

If you label something as Creative Commons, you cannot sue someone for copyright infringement later.

Contents

[edit] So where's the drama?

ALL YOUR BASE! Warning!:
Nobody understands the copyright laws. Nobody.
The Creative Commons logo. It's presence here doesn't mean you can rip this article off. Oh, wait-
The Creative Commons logo. It's presence here doesn't mean you can rip this article off. Oh, wait-
This image was on Flickr. Is it copyrighted? Who fucking knows?
This image was on Flickr. Is it copyrighted? Who fucking knows?
It is Delicious Cake. Anyone may eat it. (WARNING: No one knows what the "secret ingredient" is, because along the way, someone forgot to Attribute someone... ah, damn, who the hell knows.)
It is Delicious Cake. Anyone may eat it. (WARNING: No one knows what the "secret ingredient" is, because along the way, someone forgot to Attribute someone... ah, damn, who the hell knows.)

Just like all other fine great amazing rose-tinted sky-blue green-grassed happy-fluffy thingies of all happy future utopias, Creative Commons is being a constant source of drama because no one understands what the hell they are using the licenses for, and what the hell other people are using the licenses for.

[edit] Don't copy this shit - oh wait

Creative Commons is meant for works that are going to be freely distributed and disseminated. If that doesn't sound good to you, why the hell are you using a Creative Commons license?

Artists can be confused to hell and back by all this license weirdness. Some sites, such as Flickr and deviantART make it dead simple to add CC license to your piece of artwork, which can lead to a funny situation where the piece of artwork is proudly displayed as having a CC license, yet the artist-provided image description says "don't copy this picture or I'll crush your ballz". And gadzooks if some people actually use the picture in the way that CC license permits - butthurtitude gets off the charts.

It should be common sense to say this, but if you don't know what the hell you are doing, don't use a CC license. Click on the bloody license link and read the Creative Commons Deed (the deed text is kept as short as possible to carefully enable every idiot ever to understand it - compared to likes of GNU GPL which present you with a text wall); if those terms don't look good to you, choose another CC license or don't license the work under CC license.

[edit] Just slap a CC license on the side, it fixes everything

As said above, it's too damn easy to slap Creative Commons license on a piece of artwork, usually pieces of images grabbed from some random source or other. This is, of course, nothing new: people have been wrongly claiming copyright on other people's works since dawn of time. The only difference is that people using CC licenses spread the license notices everywhere like candy, especially ironic since CC licenses are supposed to be about proper attribution and honest use of copyright for the better tomorrow and all that shit. In short, people who don't know shit about copyright law shouldn't be given the opportunity to use a nice and easy and simple copyright chooser widget thingy.

Creative Commons solves the big license problem for original content, that's granted... but it sure as hell doesn't give any additional security to people who want to reuse the content; you still have to be skeptical about the copyright status of some works. Especially since so many people don't know damn about how the licenses they chose are supposed to really work.

Triple irony points if you find someone crying about someone redistributing a CC-licensed image that they originally just copied from somewhere...

[edit] It's teh communism!

Russian Creative Commons CP logo.
Russian Creative Commons CP logo.

The consumers are confused to hell and back by all this license weirdness too. Well, actually, it only confuses people who distribute the images, or would like to rip off pictures. You see, using a Creative Commons license is COMMUNISM. It doesn't allow the picture to be ripped off, as is done in the Properly Capitalist System where everyone is allowed to steal everyone else's work. No, Creative Commons licenses allow people to steal the work, thus causing massive unemployment for image thieves! What's the point of stealing stuff if you are allowed to do that in the first place!

[edit] Examples

Goatse demonstrates proper use of a Creative Commons logo.
Goatse demonstrates proper use of a Creative Commons logo.
  • "Purple-lilacs.com" uses a creative commons licence, as indicated by the note at the footer, however the main image on every single page is a picture from the film Revenge of the Sith. The image is undoubtedly owned by New Line Cinema, however it has been conveniently re-licensed under the creative commons by "Cyndy" for all to use. Particularly ironic is her rallying against frienditto, where she whines about copyright yet simultaneously steals a copyrighted image from New Line Cinema and also releases her entire original content under the creative commons.
  • Playwright Max Sparber released plays under a Creative Commons license that allows people to duplicate them. He released boyELROY into the public domain. Surprisingly, nobody in the entire world is interested in duplicating the play, nor does anybody know who Max Sparber is.
  • LittleCloud fails to see the slight contradiction in statements that say "Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License." and "You may not use my artwork anywhere, for any reason, without first being given my expressed permission. [...] You may do the following without my expressed permission, as long as it is strictly for private use only (and not submitted and/or credited as your own): save my artwork to a hard drive or disk, [...]."

[edit] External Links


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