Some Rights Reserved

I was looking for cases over Lawphil when I accidentally hit right-click and this appeared:

I already had an idea what Creative Commons is, but I wasn’t familiar with the different licenses they had. Upon researching, I found out that Creative Commons licenses allow one to choose certain conditions upon which to make their work available.

Attribution (by) allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way the copyright holders requested. Share Alike (sa) allows others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work. Non-Commercial (nc) allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only. No Derivative Works (nd) allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of the original work, not derivative works based upon it. (http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses)

From the four abovementioned conditions, Creative Commons has six main licenses: Attribution (cc by), Attribution Share Alike (cc by-sa), Attribution No Derivatives
(cc by-nd), Attribution Non-Commercial (cc by-nc), Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (cc by-nc-sa), and Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (cc by-nc-nd). (http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses)

The Lawphil Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license, therefore, allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as, to adapt the work, under the condition that the user must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse user’s use of the work). (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

The different licenses offered by Creative Commons allow copyright holders looking to share their works on the one hand, and still wanting to protect certain rights, to choose which “some rights reserved” license works for them. This fosters not only generosity on the part of the copyright holder, by allowing others to use or build on his work, but also (legal) creativity on the part of the public. Certain concessions are given by the artists to the public, but not to the extent that the public might unjustly enrich themselves using the works of the artists, nor to the extent that the public might pass their works of as theirs.

Licenses such as Creative Commons is the way to go in terms of copyright protection. There is really no way to fully protect one’s works as long as they are available online. Technology allows unbridled sharing, remixing, and copying, so copyright holders really cannot effectively disallow such, and be able to enforce such disallowance. The only thing they can do is to regulate their work’s use.