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What is new in Creative Commons 3.0?

24. July 2008 – 13:41 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

As the German adaption of the new version of the Creative Commons licences has been launched today I would like to take a look at what is new about version 3.0. Creative Commons is in short to legally share, remix and reuse creative content or in the words of CC itself:

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

Creative Commons is used for many different kinds of media and works all over the web. To get an overview about how variable CC is take a look at the case studies. It is very easy to get a work licensed under creative commons as the organisation provides a tool to help you choose the right licence and easy to understand graphical representations of the rights granted.

In version 3.0 a number of improvements were made to make the CC licences even easier to use and applicable in more different situations:

The “generic” licence was separated from the US licence and is now known as the “unported” licence which can be translated and ported to every language.
Harmonization of the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties to make to commonly acceptable and consistent.
The no endorsement language has been made explicit to prevent any person to misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author.
It has been made easier to “ensure that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable.”

Of course the process of revising the CC licences has been open to everyone who wanted to take part. The organisation used a mailing list to handle the discussion. I think that eParticipation by such a forward looking and innovative organisation could have been a little more sophisticated.

This evolution of the CC licences is no huge leap but fits the sentiments connected to the legal questions of copyright and in summary Creative Commons is clearly one of the most innovative and important organisations out there.

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