What was originally a common working tool of the different universities in the United States, has become one more means of communication for any home in the world. This means of communication could be said to be the paradigm of computing in its etymological sense.
Computer science is an acronym of French origin that consists of the fusion of two words: information and automatic. As it could not be otherwise, I am referring to the Internet.
The Internet is a universe of immediate access information in which anyone can start by searching for a term that is completely unknown to him and become an expert in this field. This is possible thanks to the large amount of information that is available and, above all, to the existence of search engines, meta-search engines and directories that structure the information in a way that is easily classifiable.
This huge encyclopedia has a danger, and it's the poor copyright protection it provides. Not only because of the ease of copying its content, but also because it is a fully multinational area:
A Russian person can copy a Gabriel García Márquez book translated into Chinese, publish it in a PDF that hangs on a United States server and is viewed by a person who is in Ivory Coast.
The copyright of a Colombian citizen is being violated, but where? Obviously in Russia since a Russian commits it, but how is it pursued? With this silly example one can realize how complex this can be for a publisher. Not already in the definition of the violation of rights, but when pursuing such criminal activity.
Copyright
All of us have ever wondered what is really the meaning of the "c" enclosed in a circle that is next to so many marks? It is true that we know that it is an acronym for an English word: copyright. But we do not know, apart from its literal meaning (“copy right”), what is involved or what follows from such a hackneyed symbol. This little drawing, in short, means that the right of copying is reserved. And therefore, in order to reproduce, modify or distribute said element, we must ask the author for permission, since he is the one who has - until he transfers them - all the rights to his work.
The problems of the Internet and copyright do not occur only in a publisher or a large company. Of this I can speak with my own experience that I pass - fearing to make this article more tedious than it already is - to relate:
A few years ago I wrote a story that I liked, if I may be modest, especially. Visiting a page by chance (http://www.corazones.org) I verified that among its many sections it had one of short stories in which my short story could fit. So I sent them the same saying that they could publish it on their page as long as they put a title (I'm fatal for those things) and they indicated that I was the author.
So they did, they put a title "The Burden That Made Sweet" and published it on their website stating that I was the author. After a couple of years I remembered that story and decided to gossip if any other page had published it. And indeed, eight or ten pages saw fit to publish it. However, I saw that in many of them they did not put me as their author. I contacted those responsible, making them see this lack and some people answered that they received it in one of those emails that are sent to the entire distribution list that came from another that in turn was sent by a third party…
And there I found that the Internet is not very good at protecting such copyrights. The condition of distribution so simple that I started to indicate that I was its author, was not respected since there was no way to make the existence known to the rest. And in the case of having such a form, there was no way to verify that it was complied with or, worse, there was no way to demonstrate that said work was published before me by anyone else. Like me, there are many people who do not care that their work is distributed, but always indicating who is the author of it. Or maybe there are others who do not want it to be distributed or to be distributed by paying or to be modified or not…
The difficult task of recognizing Copyright on the Internet: Lawrence Lessig How can these rights be guaranteed in a field, in a separate dimension such as the Internet? This topic was discussed six years ago by Lawrence Lessig, author of "The Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace."
In this book written in 1999, Lessig emphasizes that this situation of Internet lawless space is given by how little it is controllable in its contents, but not because of the reluctance of the different multinationals and governments to control it. And this can be achieved. How? If you can't control the content you can control the door. The secret is in the code. A clear example would be how difficult it is to eradicate the sale of pirated CDs through the police force. However, this would be very simple and cheap by means of an anti-copy system in said CD's that ensures that an average user cannot copy it.
Thus he defends following certain guidelines in the development of the code. Safeguarding certain values in such creations. Creating an architecture that allows or prevents the performance of certain activities.
This is where Lessig takes into account how inappropriate proprietary software would be to achieve this end. A program is, nowadays, a way to control the person who uses it, in its development it is possible to establish what its user can and cannot do or, worse still, monitor what she does.
Being controlled without anyone knowing to what limits. Free software, on the other hand, when developed and reviewed by an entire community, guarantees the follow-up of these desirable guidelines. Since no one can control such software. It is a software free of interests unrelated to the same purpose of said development.
Birth of and Creative Commons philosophy
Following these ideas is how Creative Commons was born at the end of 2002. Intended to adapt copyright to the mastodon that is the Internet. Their president could not be other than Lawrence Lessig and where they have participated since its inception, scholars and students of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University Law School where the project is currently housed and developed.
As they say on their website, too often the debate over copyright control tends to extreme positions. On one side is the vision of total control. To the other the anarchic vision. In this fight, values such as balance, commitment and moderation, are becoming endangered species.
Creative Commons is working to revive them. Using private rights to create a public benefit: the fact that there are creations of free use for certain cases. Like the open and free software movements, the purpose of Creative Commons is to foster cooperation and team development, but within freedom and self-will.
Offer creators the best of each of the two points outlined above to protect their works while allowing certain uses of them, calling it "some rights reserved".
Inspired in part by the GNU license from the Free Software Foundation (GNU GLP), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people bring their creations into the public domain or reserve copyright, leaving them free for certain applications, under certain conditions of use.
Unlike GNU GLP, Creative Commons licenses do not apply to software development, but to other creative work:
Web pages, educational projects, music, cinema, photography, literature, etc. Its objective is not only to increase the amount of raw material on-line, but also to make access to said material cheaper and easier.
For this they have developed some metadata that relate the content to any type of license so that it is easily interpretable by any web browser, for example. To demonstrate their usefulness, they make publicly available tools for searching online, for example, freely usable photographs or freely distributable songs. In this way, “Common Creative Work Camps” are certainly generated.
Creative Commons working
But how does it work? Can anyone apply these licenses to their work? Of course, it is a very simple system. Access to the Creative Commons page and select the distribution characteristics of our work:
Allow commercial use of your work: You decide here whether to allow others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and to perform other derivative works of the work only if it is done for no commercial purpose.
Allow modifications of your work: You must indicate if you can modify the work by distributing, displaying or executing it or if you can carry out such actions on literal copies of it.
Jurisdiction of your license: Here you indicate if you want to adapt this protection to the legislation of a certain country.
Format of his work: Text, audio, video, image…
You always have the moral right, that is, you must always recognize and quote the original author.
Once the steps have been followed, a code is generated that must be copied to the web page where the job to be protected is located and, from that moment, said protection begins to operate. The best thing about this license is the obligation to distribute derivative works under the same license conditions as the work on which its development was based.
Creative Commons future
This licensing system that has only just begun has a more than promising future. For now, the ubiquitous Yahoo! It has already developed a search system that observes the permissions collected by Creative Commons licenses. It can be accessed through. To do this, it uses the code that is inserted in the web pages and from the creators.
Even the most powerful Microsoft has made use of these licenses on PatternShare, a website hosted by the Gates company, which is owned and maintained by Ward Cunningham, inventor of wikis systems and currently an employee of Microsoft.
Conclusions
Ultimately, Creative Commons gives legal certainty to a common use of resources and guarantees the respect, at least it gives the tools for it, of the rights that each author wants to reserve of his work. It also encourages collaboration in creating culture. Something that has always existed without any problem until the arrival of the multinationals. Can you imagine what would have happened if the inventor of writing happened to have reserved all the rights to its creation? Or the discoverer of the numbers? Without their creation, the way of adding would not have been discovered, and without the way of adding, the way of multiplying and without the way of multiplying… Man naturally tends to share his discoveries. Let's not let them prey on our imaginations.
