Q&A: why we're getting more liberal with content sharing

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 30 Jun 2011 at 17:24

Online content isn't necessarily free - but if it is, it should be licensed.

That's the message from Creative Commons, the body behind free, online licences that let Wikipedia and Flickr users share content and know it's legal.

We spoke to Lisa Green, Creative Commons' chief of staff, to find out why it's important that freely shared content is marked as such - and why the licences users choose are getting more liberal.

Q. What's the idea behind Creative Commons?

A. Copyright law was made when making a copy was a serious effort. Now every time you download a PDF, you’re making a copy. Every time you share a file with someone over the internet, you’re making a copy. Therefore, these outdated copyright laws don’t suit the digital age. We’re not replacing copyright, Creative Commons sits on top of copyright law, it does not replace it.

Q. How does having a licence change people's attitudes toward content?

A. There’s this misunderstanding that if people put something on the web, they mean it to be shared. That’s understandable; you’ve just published it on a platform that reaches the entire world. But people don’t always want it to be shared and sometimes they have restrictions.

We need these licenses to communicate what the creator wants you to be able to do with that content, and so people are on sure legal footing

If I put up a picture of my grandmother, I’m happy to have people use it if they want a nice picture of an old Jewish grandmother, but I don’t want them drawing a moustache on her face or cutting her head off and pasting it on a different image. So I need to communicate with other users of the internet how I want it to be used – that it’s fine for you to use it, but don’t make derivatives.

We need these licenses to communicate what the creator wants you to be able to do with that content, and so people are on sure legal footing.

Let’s say a teacher is doing a multimedia presentation for their students on history. They go [online] and look for historical photos, and embed these photos into their multimedia presentation that they’ll present to their class. No one is going to find out about that, that teacher is not going to have a copyright lawyer come down and say “you owe us licensing fees for that”. But that teacher can’t share that with other teachers because technically that is infringement, and that could not become part of a wealth of educational resources.

It’s fine for a one-time use; they’d get away with the infringement, but wouldn’t it be so much better if we had a website that was a pool for educational resources where teachers could upload the multimedia presentations that they made, and other teachers could download them, switch them around and upload their new versions.

That would be a tremendous resource for educators and there are some sites like that, but they can’t operate unless you know everything on there has been legally cleared. If I took a picture off the web and put it into my history lesson and then uploaded it to that site, then that site would have to take it down.

Q. If you put a picture - say, of your grandmother - up under licence, and that request wasn’t followed, could you really do anything about it?

I personally am probably not going to try and find that photo of my grandmother, but I believe in the coming years it will be much easier to track content on the web with meta information and tagging that the Creative Commons is working on. In the very near future, I will be able to see every time someone has used that picture of my grandmother.