Creative Commons: the Next Best Thing for Distribution Solutions

Each day more and more people become artists and authors, where thanks to their talents new intellectual content is being created. To facilitate the distribution of these contents –without having big companies interfering the distribution process- many organizations and webpages have excelled providing strategic alternatives to distribute and publish such works.

Besides the existence of self-publishing Print-On-Demand (POD) websites, there are other organizations like Creative Commons (CC). This last one is an American non-profit organization dedicated to provide legal models and applications to facilitate the distribution and use of content within the public domain. Creative Commons present their legal models as licenses, inspired by the General Public License granted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

This organization (FSF) has dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding, and modifying of computer programs. Therefore, the licenses granted by CC are aimed to allow authors to decide the way in which their creative content will circulate on the Internet, providing freedom to quote, reproduce, create works and offer them publically. Although these licenses were written in English originally, they have been adapted to other languages and various laws in other countries. The languages in which the licenses have been translated are: Galician, Catalan, Spanish, Basque and Portuguese. Some of the countries that have adapted the CC benefits and have granted operating licenses (also adapted to their legislation) are: Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Spain, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Puerto Rico.

 

Currently all intellectual creations by default fall under the protection of the copyright laws, with the long string of restrictions that it implies. Anyone who wants to use a specific work must enter a complicated process of finding the copyright owner and obtaining his or her permission, which often involves the payment of royalties. Because of this, many projects never become materialized.

Therefore, CC provides a system that automates the content search. To license the work, the creator strictly establishes general conditions that later are incorporated into the work digitally, so that a search engine can identify them. Apart from establishing a database containing all licensed works, the organization intends to establish a creative file available for public sharing.