This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Jul 2006, by Kevin Wen.
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I described the basic idea of Creative Commons — free licenses that signaled to the world the freedoms an author intends his work to carry. In week two, we confessed we stole this idea from the Free Software Movement. In very different contexts, both they and we use free licenses to avoid the creativity-stifling effects of overly restrictive control. That control was the subject of last week’s email — the technical locks that control access to and use of content that we call DRM. DRM, we fear, will add a layer of restriction to the Internet that will defeat content interoperability, and weaken “fair use.”
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As life moves online, “free uses” shrink. Because every act on a digital network produces a copy, and “copies” trigger copyright law, there are vastly fewer “free uses” in digital space than in analog space.
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his shrinkage means that “fair use” must now shoulder the burden of protecting uses that were before free. Yet there isn’t much precedent protecting these new “fair uses.” For example, there is no case that says it is a “fair use” to give someone a book. That’s because in the analog world, giving someone a book never triggered copyright law, so no one ever needed the copyright defense of “fair use” to authorize that giving. But in the digital world, giving someone a book means making a copy. If that copy is not authorized, then it is only “fair use” that can secure the freedom to share. And those trying to defend the freedom to give must look to a body of “fair use” law built for a different world.
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if DRM is deployed the way most of it is designed, then the technology will remove the technical ability to use the work in a way that even gives you the right to make a fair use. “Fair use” would thus not be removed by the law. “Fair use” would be removed by code. And as in the United States at least, it is an offense to build tools to tinker with that code — even if the purpose is “fair use” — you begin to see the danger of DRM: digital technologies have shrunk the range of “free uses” (since every use produces a copy); this new generation of digital technology (DRM) will shrink the range of “fair uses,” by removing even the ability to use content in a way that would otherwise be “fair.”
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- By building a layer of Creative Commons marked creativity, we increase the range of creative work that doesn’t need the locks of DRM.
- By banning the use of DRM that interferes with the freedoms guaranteed by our license, we assure that the freedoms we’ve built into our license are not restricted by DRM. Among these freedoms, the very first is “fair use.” As section 2 of every license says, “Creative Commons licenses do not modify or restrict ‘fair use.’”
That’s the problem that DRM creates for “fair use.” How can Creative Commons help solve this problem?
In two important ways:
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Thus we use our licenses to build the freedoms authors want upon a reinforced layer of “fair use” freedoms. Creative Commons is thus “fair use”-plus: a promise that any freedoms given are always in addition to the freedoms guaranteed by the law.
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31 Jul 06
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29 Dec 05
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