Creative Commons Launched in Singapore

Singapore.
My afternoon session at ISEA 2008 is on copyright and the Creative Commons in Asia. In the first place, this begins with the official launch of the Creative Commons licencing suite for Singaporean copyright law - the 47th such translation into a national legislative framework.

CC co-founder Lawrence Lessig is here to do the honours, and he outlines some of the basic tenets of the Creative Commons philosophy now: in particular, the need to allow for a suite of licences which could offer a more sophisticated model for licencing content beyond the 'all rights reserved' model of copyright itself. This model, of course, has been forcefully exported from the U.S. to the rest of the world - and CC offers a different approach: not a disrespect for copyright, but a different understanding of copyright licencing.

We now move on to a panel discussion. I'm not sure I'll get the names of all the panellists, but the first is Lam Chung Nian. He begins with a reflection on the idea of property, which traditionally is founded on the concept of tangible property, and owner's rights therefore in the first place especially address the right to exclude others. This is appropriate for tangible goods, but for intellectual property - 'creations of the mind' - the picture becomes a lot more complex. Intangible property can be incorporated any number of times into tangible property; intellectual property laws therefore protect different forms of subject matter - in the form of trademarks, patents, and copyrights.

Copyright, then, protects the exclusive right of the owner to do or authorise certain acts in relation to the work - it protects expression or skill, labour, and/or judgment, not ideas, facts, or information. It is generally not dependent on artistic merit, and operates today centrally as a negative right to prevent copying. Such rights were gradually enshrined in law - beginning from the Stationers' Licencing Acts and the Statute of Anne in 1709 in the U.K.

Today, however, copying is increasingly easily possible - cheap and perfect copies can be made and distributed at high speed to multiple users across national borders. There has been a plasticisation of information, self-publishing has become widespread, and indeed every digital use necessarily involves making a copy. The Web is now the world's largest library as well as the world's largest copying machine.

This has been addressed by copyright owners and legislators in a number of ways - through automatic copyright protection, rights management protection systems, anti-circumvention measures, copyright term extensions, copyright conventions, and free trade agreements.

Copyright itself initially is an 'all rights reserved' system; within this, proprietary licencing is possible, and it is used for most forms of commercial publishing at this point. An alternative to this is the 'no rights reserved' of the public domain. To this, other licencing frameworks have added a 'some rights reserved' approach - this includes open source and related licences as well as Creative Commons itself.

In the free software community, four freedoms for users are discussed: 0. running programmes as users wish; 1. studying the source code and making changes; 2. making copies and distributing them freely; 3. publishing or distributing modified versions. Some such licences adopt a copyleft or 'share-alike' approach; some, such as BSD licences, involve 'permissive' licencing approaches.

Lam Chung Nian now points to the difference in the licences used by Wikipedia and Google's new Knol service. Knol uses Creative Commons licencing and thereby allows the creator to decide whether collaborations within it are open or closed; Wikipedia utilises the GNU Free Documentation Licence, where the creator of a piece of work has no further control over modifications made by others.

This points to the fact that not all licences are the same, and that under certain copyleft approaches derivative works are expected to be released under identical licences as the source material. Mixing or adapting creative material within a single work across licence schemes may therefore not always be permissible - however, the Free Software Foundation that operates the GNU Licences and the Creative Commons organisation are now working to address such compatibility issues.

Additionally, copyright licences are not necessarily a defence to patent infringement. Patents protect ideas and concepts per se, and for them, copying in itself is irrelevant. This also extends to computer software: whether code is copied or not may not be as important as whether the code does something that has been patented by a third party. (Even completely new code which turns out to retroengineer existing patents may infringe the law...)

What is important for content creators is to review the sources of the material they use, then, and the licences which cover them. It is also important to consider expected uses for the new work, and to understand its impacts (such as the likely chain of title, commercialisation potential, valuation of IP, and protections applied to such intellectual property). Creators need to assess their risks, and document their projects and the modifications they make to source materials.

None of this is a problem that arises only from 'some rights reserved' approaches, of course - these problems are inherent in intellectual property systems overall. 'Some rights reserved' licences indeed spell out licencing conditions with greater clarity than is necessarily the case otherwise.

Next up is Warren Chik. He begins by noting the ubiquity of copyright infringement in our everyday engagement with digital media, and highlights the ability of Creative Commons licences to avoid this habitual criminalisation of digital media users by allowing a greater range of acceptable non-infringing uses without giving up all rights to copyright.

Copyright applies to work which is original and tangible; it governs rights to copy, alter, distribute, and transfer work. Inherently, it is a protectionist response to infringement. 'Some rights reserved' approaches open up such uses further, while 'no rights reserved' approaches are inherently built in a more communitarian approach that allows free copying.

Creative Commons licences, of course, use a very clear, easy-to-understand framework addressing a number of different usage permissions which combine together to create a suite of specific licences; the most basic licencing requirement in this suite is attribution; the most restrictive licence allows only for non-commercial and non-derivative uses. Additionally, a number of further specialist licences have also been created by the Creative Commons organisation. This is crucial as we move further towards a global community engaged in various forms of user-led content creation.

Giorgos Cheliotis follows on from this by introducing the CC-Monitor project. Its aim is to track the growth in and use of CC licences around the world, and the project is now in its second year. This is related to the CC HQ Metrics project researching CC adoption worldwide.

Licence use is growing at an increasingly steep rate (possibly exponential in some legislations); there are now some 100-130 million items using CC licences worldwide. Licences most used here are BY and BY-SA on the one, and BY-NC-SA and BY-NC-ND on the other hand (a bipolar distribution, as Giorgos puts it, which may mirror the broader copyright/public domain divide). At the same time, people using Creative Commons licences are neither very radical nor very conservative in their licence choices - CC is an inclusive and well-balanced movement, in other words.

Giorgos now shows an interesting graph showing the possibly exponential growth in CC licences. This is built largely on Web-based information, and therefore does not cover all CC-licenced material, of course. Over the course of CC adoption, the balance between different licence types has remained relatively stable, interestingly. (More on this will be presented at the upcoming iCommons Summit in Sapporo.) Giorgos now finishes with an open invitation to Singaporeans to become involved in spreading the word about CC licences in the country, to ensure exponential growth of licence uptake here as well.

Next up is John Phillips from Creative Commons HQ in Singapore, who runs us through a number of high-profile examples of CC usage around the world. One is the video The Elephant's Dream from the Netherlands; another is the Big Buck Bunny movie, both of which have been supported by CC Netherlands in collaboration with the Blender Institute, which made the films.

Rock band Nine Inch Nails recently released some of their music under CC licences, which ended up boosting the sales of their CDs; Flickr contains millions of images licenced under CC; and the top five portals in South Korea all support CC licencing in significant ways. Google has increasingly embraced and supported CC licencing as well - in its support for Radiohead's most recent release through Google Code, in its use of CC licences in its Wikipedia competitor Knol, and in quite a few other cases. John has worked to collect such cases in the case studies section of the Creative Commons Website.

Additionally, there's also a growing range of tools and widgets which make choosing and embedding CC licences into new and existing content much more easily possible. Finally now to a speaker from Red Hat. Harish (?) notes Red Hat's use of GPL for source code and CC licences for any other (text, image, video) content. He notes the pressing need to engage with the next generation of users, to ensure that licencing issues and options are addressed at the school level, building copyright literacies where necessary. (In response, John notes the development of CC comics which help users understand how CC works.)

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