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Creative Commons licences are useful but oversold

Creative Commons is a popular movement feeding on a populist anti-copyright molopolists zeitgeist growing in recent decades, particularly among academics, hackers and the digerati. The reception given to Creative Commons has been so positive and widespread that it has obscured the fact that it is the right solution some of the time; it is not all of the solution for all people all of the time. It is useful for solving a range of needs of copyright creators, licensors, and users. It adds to and is supported by traditional copyright law and practices. It does not replace them. This article uses the word traditional to distinguish approaches to copyright licensing which pre-date Creative Commons. This article is a critique in praise of Creative Commons. It is structured around three observations regarding limitations or limiting design features in Creative Commons licences. To maintain focus, examples are only drawn from the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/) licence. Many comments also apply to the five other Creative Commons licences available in Australia.

Full post as published by Lightbulb IP blog on January 02, 2008 (boomark / email).