WEEK 7 LECTURE

CREATIVE COMMONS

• What is creative commons and how could this licensing framework be relevant to your own experience at university?

Creative Commons is a licensing concept created by Creative Commons that builds upon traditional copyright practices to define possibilities that exist between the standard "all rights reserved" full copyright and public domain "no rights reserved". A Creative Commons license lets you dictate how others may use your work. The Creative Commons license allows you to keep your copyright but allows others to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit and only on the conditions you specify. For online work you can select a license that generates "Some Rights Reserved" or a "No Rights Reserved" button and statement for your published work.

Under the rules of Creative Commons, people wanting to use other people's work must adhere to the creative common licences posted with the original piece of work. The picture below lists the available creative common licences, full descriptions of each licence can be found at Creative Commons Australia website which is the Australian regulator of Creative Commons licences.

This type of licences could be valuable in universities particular in the field of IT (my bachelor degree). For students who develop source code for projects in programming classes that they feel has some 'real world' value. Adding one of these licences would protect them while allowing the code to be used for learning capabilities.

• 3 Examples of works that are licenced under Creative Commons

This album is the first independent release from Nine Inch Nails following its announcement that it had severed its ties with Interscope Records. The album was released under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA), and in a variety of differing packages at various price points, including a US$300 "Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition". ''Ghosts'' was initially released digitally on the official Nine Inch Nails website without any prior advertisement or promotion. Via the official Nine Inch Nails YouTube profile, a user-generated "film festival" was announced, where fans were invited to visually interpret the album's music and post their results. The album was nominated for two Grammy Awards, in the categories "Best Rock Instrumental Performance" and "Best Box Set or Limited Edition Package". These nominations represented the first time music released under a Creative Commons license had been nominated for a Grammy Award.

A short film titled "Big Buck Bunny" created using Creative Commons Lincence's.

Blogger the very technology I'm using to write this blog exists because of Creative Commons Licences.

• Find an academic article which discusses creative commons using a database or online journal. Provide a link to and a summary of the article.

The article by David Berry and Giles Moss in issue 5 of the Free Software Magazine titled, "On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonalty. Is the Creative Commons missing something?". Talks about how it thinks creative commons is too much concerned with the present climate and not enough with where the creative movement might go, it also argues that creative commons is too quick to side with the creative community. An interesting point this article makes is that despite all the claims of creative commons enabling the sharing of cultural goods and resources between individuals and groups. That rather these goods are neither really shared or owned in common but rather left to the whim of private individuals and groups to permit reuse and that they pick and choose to use common's and everything it applies when and where they like. If you would like to read the article click on the article's title.

• Have a look at Portable Apps (a pc based application) – provide a brief description of what it is and how you think this is useful.

Portable apps is a computer software program that is able to run independently without the need to install files to the system it is run upon. They are commonly used on a removable storage device such as a CD, USB flash drive, flash card, or floppy disk.

Portable apps are useful in the same way creative commons can be, as it provides the user with independence. Independence from the restrictions of conventional software program requirements, such as registration (personal details) and conformity to their product and only their product. The use of portable apps also allows the user the freedom to manouvre the technologicl landscape how they see fit, without the restrictions of being tied to any particular operating system.