Creative Commons – Good or Bad?

Creative Commons is a non profit organization whose purpose is to increase the amount of creative works that are available to the general public for “free and legal sharing.” The company’s goal is to expand the amount of these works so that members of the public can build and expand upon them. Creative Commons does this by using the copyright model that it invented, “some rights reserved” instead of the standard “all rights reserved” copyright model that has been in place for many years. A copyright license obtained through Creative Commons allows the originator of the work to designate which the specifics of how and when someone can use their creative work.

The people behind Creative Commons believe that the “some rights reserved” copyright model is preferable because the standard copyright model is too strict and doesn’t allow people to share and build upon others works.

However, there are many critics of this model who feel that it is unneeded and that it will hurt the copyrights in the long run. Some people believe that the standard copyright format already allows for the “some rights reserved” format and that Creative Commons ignores the basis behind creative works and makes it too easy for anyone to just take someone else’s work and tweak it how they see fit, without really ever doing anything original themselves. These critics also believe that this model does not provide for things like financial compensation for artists. Further, there are many critics who believe that Creative Commons seeks to bypass the law process by just writing down new rules, and that it is slowly eroding the creative copyright process by not giving any guidelines as to what a creative work is.

Personally I feel that Creative Commons is a good thing, and will not really hurt anything in the end, but each person can decide for themselves what they think about the Creative Commons copyright format.