Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) adalah suatu organisasi nirlaba yang memfokuskan diri untuk memperluas cakupan karya kreatif yang tersedia untuk orang lain secara legal untuk digunakan kembali dan dibagi. Organisasi ini telah menerbitkan beberapa lisensi hak cipta yang dikenal dengan lisensi Creative Commons. Lisensi-lisensi ini, tergantung dengan mana yang dipilih, membatasi hanya suatu (atau tidak ada sama sekali) hak atas suatu karya.

Logo Creative Commons

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Introduction

The Creative Commons, crafted by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig and others in December 2002, provides a set of copyright licenses free for public use.1 A creator who is willing to release her work under a Creative Commons (CC) license can go to the Creative Commons website (creativecommons.org) and make a selection among various license options with a simple mouse-click (creativecommons.org/license/). If she chooses to license her work under a CC attribution license, for example, she retains her copyright but allows others to use her work without permission and without payment, as long as they credit her for the original creation. After the mouse-click, the website provides her with several lines of computer code that she can copy and paste at her website. Visitors to her website will see a Creative Commons logo and a sentence under the logo indicating the conditions and jurisdiction, if specified, of her license. The logo and the sentence are embedded with a link that directs visitors to Commons Deed, a quick and easy summary of the full license. Another click from the Deed takes the visitors to the full license. Meanwhile, a user who is looking for content to use under less restrictive conditions than traditional copyright law can go to the Creative Commons website and find CC-licensed works by using the search engines or directories there.

The Creative Commons has drawn some positive responses and is growing in popularity. It was estimated that five million items were available under CC licenses as of October 2004 ("Movement Seek," 2004); some 145 million creations had been registered as of June 2006 (Rohter, 2006). Many news stories have been written about the uses and success of CC licenses (e.g., Chmielewski, 2004; "Movement Seeks," 2004; Rohter, 2006). A number of scholars have also noted the potential of the Creative Commons to serve public interests (Gasaway, 2003; Jones, 2004; Merges, 2004; O'Hara, 2003; Reichman & Uhlir, 2003; Stoeltje, 2004; Wagner, 2003).

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the Creative Commons can resolve the conflict surrounding copyright law in the digital era. The theoretical framework that guides the focal inquiry of this study is taken from Kim (2005). In brief, that framework posits that there are two competing visions of the fundamentals of copyright law: a "private property" vision and a "public policy vision." The private property vision is so termed because those who support it believe that copyright originated as a natural law property right of authors, and that authors who create original works deserve to have property rights over their work. The emphasis of the private property vision is on the private interests of authors in controlling the use of copyrighted works as their property. The public policy vision, in contrast, is held by those who note that copyright has historically developed as society's grant of a limited monopoly, and who think that the rights of authors must be weighed against the freedom of everyone else to use the copyrighted work. This vision is termed the public policy vision, because it underscores the importance of public interests in accessing and using copyrighted work. It also underlines the role of copyright as a matter of public policy that aims to achieve a proper balance between private interests and public interests.

The two competing visions have clashed throughout the 300-year development of copyright law, but the conflict between them has escalated in the digital era. Advocates of the private property vision hoped that digital technology would enable copyright holders to collect fees for each use of their copyrighted works (e.g., Goldstein, 2003). Instead, they observed massive copyright infringement. Content providers, including the music industry, are desperate to institute a vigorous enforcement mechanism against copying to protect their ownership.

Proponents of the public policy vision hoped that digital technology would promote production and sharing of cultural products (e.g., Benkler, 2000; Kranich, 2004). Instead, they observed that contemporary copyright law has become so restrictive that it risks impeding future innovation and creativity. For example, Samuelson (n.d.) stated that today's major copyright industries, fearing a substantial loss of control over copyrighted material because of technological developments, have lobbied to gain more control over consumers than they have ever had before. Similarly, Boyle (2004) wrote that contemporary intellectual property policy is "in the sway of a maximalist 'rights-culture' which leads debate astray" (Introduction, para. 4).

The birth of the Creative Commons is closely related to the concern that the attempts of copyright holders to protect ownership of their copyrighted material are threatening users' freedoms. CC Chairman Lessig, noting the changes that copyright law has undergone (2004b), argued that there has been a shift from "free culture" to a restrictive, permission culture (2004a). When he said free culture, he meant free in the sense of "freedom," not in the sense of "no payment." People used to have freedom to create, to use cultural resources, to criticize others using the culture around them. However, Lessig states that "those freedoms are increasingly restricted. And the question becomes, how do we respond?" (2004b, p. 10). One response that Lessig and others who share the public policy vision have suggested is the Creative Commons, which aims "to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules" ("Some Rights Reserved," n.d.).

Although the Creative Commons was suggested by supporters of the public policy vision, it seems to have potential to resolve the boiling conflict between the two visions of copyright law. To be a solution, it must satisfy three conditions: First, it must accurately reflect the ways people produce creative works; second, it must serve the private interests of creators; and third, it must serve the public interests of users.

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• Creative Commons