Hard Mode 6: Some Rights Reserved?

"Creative Commons is a non-profit organization started by Lawrence Lessig in 2001, [...] its goal is to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules."

An excerpt from the article "Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy," by Bas Bloemsaat and Pieter Kleve, in the International Review of Law, Computers & Technology.

According to the authors, Creative Commons, or CC, since its inception in 2001 has been a popular "alternative" to copyright. Copyright gives the holder certain economic rights, such as the sole and exclusive right to earn money from the work. The threat of being sued for huge wads of cash, among other difficulties, is the greatest chilling factor to creative expression nowadays.

Enter CC.

CC, for all intents and purposes, is a waiver of the author's economic rights. CC offers six (acutally five) types of form licenses (called "legal codes") which individual authors may copy-paste onto their works. These are:

1. Attribution (cc-by) - Only acknowledgment of the author is required. Work may be copied, remixed, and sold without express permission from the author.
2. No derivative works (cc-nd) - No remixing allowed.
3. Noncommercial (cc-nc) - Work and all its derivatives cannot be used commercially.
4. Share alike (cc-sa) - If the work is remixed or derived, the derivative work must be published in the same licensing scheme as the original work.
5. "Mixed" - A combination of any of the above licenses; e.g., cc-by-nd, cc-by-nc-sa

But the authors argue that these solutions are already provided for by the current IP laws. First, there is the exception of "fair use," and second, waivers of economic rights are also allowed, without needing to resort to specialized licenses such as CC.

Another stumbling block is the problem of Attribution. Under US jurisdiction, if a work is not claimed by anyone, it is deemed public domain. And it also goes the other way around: if a work is public domain, it cannot be claimed by anyone. This implies that a cc-by work is treated as public domain by US law, and therefore Attribution fails its purpose since the author cannot claim authorship over his work which now became part of public domain.