The Phenemenon of Wikipedia and Creative Commons

In recent years, whenever my youngest sister had a question, I would always have some sort of an answer... courtesy of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia that allows virtually anyone to contribute to the site. The range of topics available is overwhelming and is potentially limited only by the limits of the imagination of the human mind.

However, one can imagine the difficulty of applying a copyright in the traditional sense on the site due to the sheer number of contributors. Traditionally, one copyright would be granted a website but how does address the fact that there are so many authors?

In comes a new mode of copyright called creative commons. Creative commons is a license based on copyright. But unlike traditional copyright, it allows you to dictate how others may utilize your copyright right which means that you can allow others to modify or distribute your work without having them come into conflict with infringement.

Furthermore, this type of license is attached not to the site but to the work itself such that if a user decides to download your work and later emails a copy to a friend, this would mean that you would have two different agreements with the possessors of your work. And most importantly, both would not have violated copyright laws by possessing your work.

Thus this would seem to be an ideal system for sites such as wikipedia which contain multiple contributors and allow the users to modify the original works with their own input. This would also seem ideal for sites such as youtube which allows access to millions if not yet billions of videos to the general public.

However, a question comes to mind. How does one make money off his work if he applies a license like this?

Usually an author applying for this kind of license would not be in it for the money. The satisfaction would be from the propagation and appreciation of his work. But the point is valid. After all, we all have to eat ...

The creative commons license is nonexclusive. This means that there could be more than one license in place. Why is this important? Because authors could have two licenses, one for free use and the other for money. Probably there is value added to the one with remuneration such as access to the author or some kind of support. Thus it can be an ideal setup for the difficulties encountered by traditional copyright on the internet.