The best stories lasted. Even the plot and characters of Hackerteen are based on plots and characters that people have been using for thousands of years.

Ownership

People want to share ideas (after all, does it feel good to keep a story to yourself?) but they want to own them too. What does that mean?

Of course, you can't own a story or song the way you can own a bicycle. As soon as you tell the story or sing the song, other people can repeat it. Of course, you can own a physical book or CD, but that's not the same as owning the story or song.

No one can steal your story or song the way they can steal your bicycle, so we mean something different by ownership.

First, you probably want people to acknowledge that you made up the story. You'll get mad if somebody else claims he thought it up—and even madder if he makes money that way.

Ownership, in this meaning, goes back almost as long as sharing. We still speak Homer as the author of epic poems. Actually, he must have gotten a lot of the ideas in those poems from other people. And they weren't written down till hundreds of years after he died (because the Greeks didn't have writing when he was alive), so the stories certainly changed after he wrote them. But we honor him as their creator because he provided the main creative spark. 

Ownership took on a different meaning when people started to make money by printing large numbers of books—after printing presses were invented—and by performing plays and musical pieces. Publishing became a business for the first time. Typesetting and printing a book cost a lot of money, and a publisher could lose money if some other publisher copied the book.

Still, it took more than 250 years after Gutenberg's first printing press for publishers to demand a law to prevent copying. (The British queen had published a copyright law earlier, in order to censor works.) Although the new laws were requested by publishere, not authors, the authors ended up getting control over who could sell copies of books, who could perform plays and music, and so forth.

This kind of ownership is still very different from owning a bicycle. But copyright got more and more important as more and more money could be made from these sorts of content. When it became possible to make millions of dollars from a movie or a song in the 20th century, and huge companies were built on this content, copyright started to touch every area of public life.

 

What's covered by copyright

When something is covered by copyright, you're not allowed to use it without permission. Permission is hard to get, and often so expensive (even if the owner gives you permission) that you can't afford it.

 

Copyright covers:

 

If you draw a picture containing a character from a cartoon or movie. (And sometimes it's covered by a trademark too.)

 

If you write a story using characters you found in another story,

 

If you quote two or more lines of somebody else's poem or song.

 

If you make a movie that shows a TV playing a show in the background.

 

If you take a drumbeat from somebody's song and base your own song on it.

 

If you paste code from somebody's web page into your own.

These are just a few examples to show how much copyright enters into what creative people do nowadays. Computers, digital media, and the Internet make copying easy. But copyright makes copying hard—in a legal sense.

Copyright is supposed to expire, but current laws make it last so long that most of us will die before we get to use copyrighted material that's being created now.

Where Creative Commons helps

Creative Commons makes copyright law more flexible. You can't change somebody else's copyright, but you can choose to release stories, songs, videos, and other creative works under rules of your own choosing. Creative Commons lets people reuse your work freely. But you can still control whether they put your name on it, whether they can change it, and whether they can make money from it.

Creative Commons offers different licenses (a license is a legal document, just like licenses you see on web sites when you want to download something). These licenses are based on copyright law, but share some of your rights in the way you choose.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons" — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

Why Does Creative Commons Exist?

Copyright in a creative work enables the copyright holder to sue others who use the work without permission. In recent years copyright has expanded in scope and duration, reducing the size of the commons. At the same time, digital technologies have made it ever easier for anyone to create, share, and repurpose creative works. In combination, these developments mean that increasingly copyright and its need to obtain permission — often impossible — is the barrier to fully realizing the creative and participatory potential of new technologies.

Creative Commons provides voluntary means to unlock this potential — for creators to grant permission in advance, and for users and re-creators to find and use creative works — without needing to hire a lawyer.

How Does Creative Commons Work?

Creative Commons provides, free, easy-to-use legal tools that give everyone from individual creators to major companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to pre-clear copyrights to their creative work. CC licenses let people easily change thier copyright terms of the default of "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved."

Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They apply on top of copyright, so you can modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs. We've collaborated with intellectual property experts all around the world to ensure that our licenses work globally, accounting for differences in copyright law among different jurisdicitons.

What Can Creative Commons Do for Me?

If you've created something and want people to know that you're happy to have them share, use, and build upon your work, you should consider publishing user a Creative Commons license. CC's legal infrastructure gives you flexibility (for example, you can choose to only pre-clear non-commercial uses) and protects the people who use your work (so that they don't have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the terms you have specified).

If you're an artist, student, educator, scientist, or other creator looking for content that you can freely and legally use, there is a giant pool of CC-licensed creativity available to you. There are many millions of works — from songs and videos to scientific and academic content — that you can use under the terms of our copyright licenses.

What Conditions Can I Put On Pre-cleared Use Of My Work With CC Licenses?

Icons in () below are available in vector and bitmap formats at http://creativecommons.org/presskit

Attribution. You let people copy, distribute, display, perform, and remix your copyrighted work, as long as they give you credit the way you request. All CC licenses contain this property.

Non-Commercial. You let people copy, distribute, display, perform, and remix your work for non-commercial purposes only. If they want to use your work for commercial purposes, they must contact you for permission.

Share Alike. You let people create remixes and derivative works vbased on your cretive work, as long as they only distribute them under the same Creative Commons license that your original work was published under.

No Derivative Works. You let people copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work — not make derivative works based on it. If they want to alter, transform, build upon, or remix your work, they must contact you for permission.

MORE: These conditions may be combined in different ways to make six different licenses. http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses

MORE: While Creative Commons enables you to choose to put any of these conditions on use of your work, many communities have strong opinions about which conditions you should choose. Some, especially those inspired by the ethics of Free Software, consider Non-Commercial and No Derivative Works too restrictive. Read more about this perspective in the Definiton of Free Cultural Works. freedomdefined.org

What Are Some Examples Of Creativity Available Under CC Licenses?

Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV

Nine Inch Nails released this four album set under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This means you can share and remix the music, but only for non-commercial purposes. If you share remixes of the music, you have to offer them under the same license. Any use has to give NIN credit.

Connexions

Connexions, hosted by Rice University, makes thousands of educational "modules" on every subject available under a CC Attribution license. This means you're free to do almost anything with this educational content, for any purpose, so long as you give credit.

Flickr

Flickr, a photo-hosting site and photography community, enables members to apply CC licenses to their photos. All six CC licenses are available, and as of early 2008, over 60 million photos on the site are pre-cleared with CC licenses.

This page is based on materials published by Creative Commons under a CC Attribution license .

This page itself is published under a CC Attribution license. If you share or build upon the content in this page, give credit to Creative Commons and Hackerteen .