Creative Commons

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!

Creative Commons is teh futar.

Creative Commons is a system of licenses (confusing jargon) that permits individuals (hippies, liberals, fags, etc.) to use or appropriate (steal, manipulate, fuck with) your work (stupid memes, animutations, shitty demo tapes, Wikipedia articles) without obtaining your expressed written permission. Lawrence Lessig (commie bastard) developed this system as an alternative to restrictive copyright laws. 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.

So where's the drama?

Warning! Nobody understands the copyright laws. Nobody.

The Creative Commons logo. Its presence here doesn't mean you can rip this article off. Oh, wait--

This image was on Flickr. Is it copyrighted? Who 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 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.

Don't copy this shit...oh, wait--

Creative Commons is intended for works that are 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 are often confused to hell and back by all this license weirdness. Sites like Flickr and deviantART make it dead simple to add a CC license to your artwork, which can lead to a funny situation when said artwork is proudly displayed as having a CC license, yet the artist-scribed image description reads, "don't copy this picture or I'll crush your ballz". And gadzooks, if some people actually use the picture in a way that the CC license permits, massive butthurt ensues.

If you don't know what the hell you're doing, don't use a CC license. Click on the bloody license link and read the Creative Commons Deed (the deed text is as short as possible to enable every idiot to understand it, unlike the GNU GPL, which presents the reader with a text wall); if those terms don't look good to you, you can choose another CC license or don't license the work under CC license.

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

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

Creative Commons solves the big license problem for original content, but it sure as hell doesn't provide 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 anything about how the licenses they chose are supposed to function.

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

It's teh communism!

Russian Creative Commons CP logo.

CC is extremely confusing to those who distribute 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 Proper 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?

Examples

Goatse demonstrates proper use of a Creative Commons logo.

• Playwright Max Sparber has distributed plays under a Creative Commons license that allows people to duplicate them. He released boyELROY into the public domain. Of course, nobody in the entire world is interested in duplicating the play, nor does anybody know who Max Sparber is.
• LittleCloud fails to understand the slight contradiction in the following statements:

	“	Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.	„

	“	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, [...].	„

See Also

• Tracing
• Art theft

External Links

• Creative Commons
• Even Charlie Manson uses Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is part of a series on DeviantART Visit the DeviantART Portal for complete coverage.

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