Creative_Commons

toc =Creative Commons= See page http://cc4dice.wikispaces.com/Sharing_OA_CC for further elaboration

The Creative Commons project - launched in 2001 - is inspired by the Open Access movement. For instance, Creative Commons has launched:
 * [|Science Commons], in 2005, which aims at bringing the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science.
 * [|CClearn], a division of Creative Commons created in 2007, dedicated to support open learning and open educational resources.

For more information about the aims of Creative Commons and the Open Access movement, as well as about the Science Commons and CCLearn initiatives, see e.g. Lawrence Lessig's [| It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right] talk at [|Educause 2009]. =Creative Commons (CC) Licenses= [|Creative Commons (CC) Licenses] were launched in 2002. Their goal is to enable authors to simply mark their works with the uses of their works they want to autorize and those they want to restrict, within existing copyright laws. In other words, CC licenses are based on a "Some rights reserved" model, rather than the "All rights reserved" model of strict copyright. Since 2002, the number of works under Creative Commons licenses has regularly and impressively increased, from ca. 1 million by 2003, to ca. 130 millions by 2008.

Four basic modules
A creative commons license results from a combination of modules chosen from four possible modules:
 * **BY - attribution to the author/s** - is compulsory because attribution is required by copyright laws (though see the paragraph about the CC0 module below).
 * **NC - No commercial use** - means that the author/ do/es not automatically authorize commercial uses, for which - as with traditional copyright licenses - permission must be requested.
 * **ND - No derivative works** - means that the author/ do/es not automatically authorize modifications, for which - as with traditional copyright licenses - permission must be requested.
 * **SA - Share Alike -** means that if others want to diffuse the work, they must do it under the same CC license that was chosen by the author.

Three for Open Access
The 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities specifies that Open Access contributions must bear a declaration by which: > ...the author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly **and to make and distribute derivative works**, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship .... Therefore, if authors decide to use a Creative Commons license for this declaration, they cannot include the ND module in this license.

CC0 module
As Lawrence Lessig explained in the Science Commons section of his [| It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right] talk at [|Educause 2009], the CC0 module, by which all rights are waived ("No rights reserved") is meant for data collections, not for creative work, Data per se are not protected by copyright, but data collections can - though they do no have to - be in some legislations. For more information about the CC0 module, see [|About CC0 — “No Rights Reserved”] and [|CC0 FAQ - CC Wiki].

Ported / Unported
While the copyright / author's right laws of most countries are based on the same international treaties, conventions and agreements, they differ in some aspects. Therefore, in order to make the CC licenses more easily enforceable in the author's /authors' countries, their legal code (see "Three versions", below) have also been or are being adapted, or "ported", to national copyright / author's right laws. It is advisable to choose a ported license when possible, and to only use an unported (or "generic") license when a work has several authors who reside in different countries.

Three versions
Each CC license, resulting from a combination of the above modules, and of the choice between an unported and a ported license, presents itself in three versions:
 * human-readable
 * lawyer-readable
 * machine-readable

Human-readable
The human-readable summary is the version the license declaration in the work and/or in its description links to. It explains in simple, short sentences the permissions granted and the uses restricted by the author, and it is not affected by the ported/unported (see above) choice. This summary is often enough (in particular for texts and images).

Lawyer-readable
However, for multimedia, and for institutional uses, as in the case of Open Access repositories, it is advisable to read, or to consult a lawyer who can read, the full legal code of the license, which is linked to at the bottom of the human-readable summary. For instance, the legal code of Swiss ported CC licenses specifies that "...Diese Lizenz entbindet Sie nicht davon, allfällige nach dem anwendbaren Gesetz oder Nutzungstarif geschuldeten Vergütungen zu bezahlen.... " (...this licence does not free you from the obligation to pay fees that may be due according to the applicable law or use rates...), because of the dispositions in the Swiss copyright / author's right law regulating the role of collecting societies (see the "Collecting societies" chapter).

Machine-readable
The machine-readable code - which only works in web pages - is generated when a license is created. It is used, for instance, by search engines like Google or Flickr's to enable the search for works under a specific CC license. You see the machine-readable code when you create your CC license (see the "How to create a license" section) or you by looking at the source code of a page where a CC license is inserted - provided the author has chosen to insert it in full. Apart from the permissions and restrictions, it can also contain other optional indications that you are invited to add when you create a license.

How to create a license
Fortunately, creating a CC license is more simple than might appear from the above description. All you have to do is go to the interactive form in http://creativecommons.org/choose/, which is offered in several languages, among which, English, German, French and Italian. Next to each option, there is an "i" symbol on which you can click to get further explanations. However, particularly if you want a license for an official/institutional use (e.g. in an Open Access contribution), it is advisable to also read [|Before Licensing], linked to in this interactive form.

Necessary data
The first part of the form prompt you to give information that is necessary in order to create your license: > Allow commercial uses of your work? Yes - No > Allow modifications of your work? Yes - Yes, as long as others share alike - No > Jurisdiction of your license Information (with a drop list of countries, where Switzerland is listed under C, for CH)

Additional data
The second part of the form prompts you to give additional indications, that will get inserted in the machine-readable code: > Tell us the format of your work: > Title of work > Attribute work to name > Attribute work to URL > Source work URL > More permissions URL

Getting your license
When you have finished your selection of options, click on the "Select a License" button and you will be taken to a page that offers:
 * the URL of the human-readable summary of the license
 * a choice of icons symbolising your license
 * the code for embedding it in a web page (or blog, or wiki...), which generates the icon symbolising your license, a link to the human-readable summary, and includes any additional information you have chosen to give in the second part of the form.

Licensing an offline work
This is particularly important if you use a CC license for an Open Access contribution, because such contributions must include the declaration by which you "... grant to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship .... . Michael Paskevicius has made a very clear video tutorial about this: [|Creative Commons Licensing Offline Work Walkthrough], with English captions and - so far - French and Italian subtitles . =Some sites under CC licenses= In order to better understand the implications of CC licenses, let us look at some sites that host educational materials.

SFEM
The [|Swiss Forum for Educational Media] (SFEM) was created by several organizations, under the direction of the Schweizerischen [|Stiftung für audiovisuelle Bildungsangebote] (SSAB - Swiss foundation for audiovisual educational offers, itself under the control of the Swiss federal department of internal affairs). The chairperson of SFEM - and of SSAB - is Dr Hannah Muralt-Müller, former Vice-Chancellor of the Swiss Confederation. The use of a CC license by such an official initiative is therefore important.

CC license
The SFEM site is under a BY (attribution) unported CC license. Presently, the CC license indicated only by a logo picture in the bottom part of the template, linked to the human-readable part of the license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. The source code for the license does not provide any of the indications normally present when it is generated by the form in http://creativecommons.org/choose/ - not even the alternative description ([|alt attribute] ) of the logo picture needed by blind people to know what is in it - or by search engines.

CC license and content
The license was apparently inserted in the template some time after April 5, 2008, date of the [|last version of the site] cached by the Internet Archive Like all former versions of the site cached by the Internet Archive, it did not have a Creative Commons license or any copyright indication. Therefore, at least until April 5, 2008, the content of the site was, by default, under strict copyright, and was retroactively put under the CC BY license when it was inserted in the template. The choice of an unported license seems at odds with the fact that the SFEM site includes video [|podcasts]. considering the specific Swss legal issues concerning the publishing and dissemination of video works. By April 2008, the ported CC licenses for Switzerland, which take these issues into account, had already been available for several months. In the case of the text documents presently linked to in the [|SFEM - Keynotes] page, and hosted on the SFEM's site, the site's BY (attribution) CC license is in contrast with documents either bearing a strict copyright license (e.g. "© Rolf Schulmeister, Hamburg 2008" for Prof. Dr. Rolf Schulmeister's [|Gibt es eine »Net Generation«? – Version 2.0] ), or bearing no copyright or licensing mention (e.g. Dr. Peter A. Gloor's [|Coolhunting durch Schwarmkreativität] ), which also means, by default, that they are under strict copyright.

Remarks
The use of a CC BY license - the most permissive of all Creative Commons licenses - by as eminent an initiative as SFEM has a very strong exemplary value for all Swiss higher education institutions. So has its commitment to the Open Access movement, evident also in the fact that the resources given in the [|Links] section of the site all concern Open Access and Open Educational Resources, which even include a direct link to the already quoted Berlin Declaration on Open Access. However, it is surprising that no attention has been paid to the part of this Declatation that specifies explicitly how use permissions must be stated. And as to the above-mentioned idiosyncratic form and use of the CC BY license in the SFEM's site (just hosting the license logo image on the SFEM site and linking it to the human-readable summary of the license), it might be advisable to re-do the license mention with the interactive form for creating a license in http://creativecommons.org/choose/. This would prompt the SFEM team to indicate a jurisdiction, and hence to get a ported Swiss license instead of an unported one (see above). It might even incite the team to read the cautionary advice in the [|Before Licensing] page, which is linked to in this form.

Stella
[|Stella] - launched in April 2008 - is "an interactive and multilingual web portal for all people involved in science education who want to communicate experiences, cooperate, exchange ideas and thoughts on teaching methods and approaches (...) funded with the support of the European Commission."

CC license
The [|Stella] Web site is under a Creative Commons unported BY-NC-ND license, mentioned in the template, at the bottom of the site pages: > [logo image, described via the [|alt attribute], hence accessible to blind people and to search engines, linked to the license] Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. By comparison with the SFEM license:
 * Here, the choice, the choice of an unported license is justified by the fact that Stella is an international project.
 * The "Except where otherwise noted" waiver covers content offered for re-use (e.g. templates).
 * However, the BY-NC-ND license is the most restrictive of all Creative Commons licenses.

CC license and content
The educational contents showcased by Stella actually remain on their original sites and are linked to on the Stella site - in contrast with SFEM's re-uploading to its server articles that already exist elsewhere.. So there are no problems of license compatibility for contents produced by others.

Remarks
While the reasons for the choice of the ND clause are not quite clear, overall, Stella's use of a CC license is efficient and coherent.

OpenCourseWare
The first public version of MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) was launched in 2002, which makes it a pioneer of the Open Access movement. From the [|About OCW] page: > Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds. > Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required. > MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

CC licence
The OCW Web site is under a Creative Commons US-ported BY-NC-SA license, which is mentioned in the template, at the bottom of the template for all pages, both
 * through a properly described via the [|alt attribute] license logo image linked to the license's human-readable summary
 * through a link to the [|Privacy and Terms of Use] page, which contains the whole human-readable summary of the license with further explanations.

CC license and content
Repeating the CC license in the [|Privacy and Terms of Use] page means that the URL (address) for this page can be - and is indeed - added to all OCW Open Access text contributions. Even in the case of the [|MIT OpenCourseWare YouTube channel] for MIT's OCW, the descriptions for all videos always contain the mention: > License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA > More information at @http://ocw.mit.edu/terms > More courses at http://ocw.mit.edu and the videos themselves all mention http://ocw.mit.edu, from which the @http://ocw.mit.edu/terms page can be accessed in one click: see, e.g., [|YouTube - Official MIT OpenCourseWare 1800 Event Video].

Remarks
The OCW's BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license would also fit the requisites for an Open Access contribution defined by the 2003 Berlin declaration. And having this license - or any other similar license fitting those requisites - inserted in a "Terms of use" page, as OCW does, would also facilitate the insertion of these permissions and restrictions in the contributions to other Open Access repositories. In Switzerland, such a page could be multilingual, with inner links leading to each linguistic version. =In nuce=
 * Creative Commons licenses are easy to use, both by content creators and by content users.
 * The possibility to combine their BY, NC, ND and SA modules permits a variety of solutions for conferring some rights to users while withholding other rights.
 * Some - but not all - of these combinations can answer the requisites for Open Access contributions, as defined by the 2003 Berlin declaration.
 * However, if you are not yet familiar with CC licenses, it is advisable to carefully read the information offered in the interactive form in http://creativecommons.org/choose/, and the [|Before Licensing] page before creating yours.
 * If you want to use a Creative Commons license for a contribution to an Open Access repository, remember to add it within your contribution itself, and not only in the description of the contribution

=Comments from CC-CH team= To be integrated in the text: (If your text editing software does not read ODT files, you can open this one with [|Google Docs], then download it from there in the format you prefer). (page in construction 1263253061)