On CC Licenses

//This piece was commissioned by 8btc. The Bitcoin community is naturally inclined toward the spirit of free software, so it ought to be easier to accept the CC licenses. But copyright awareness in China is generally rather weak, and CC licenses are even less familiar, so plagiarism occurs frequently. Even places like 8btc that have brought up CC licenses still lack respect for them within the community. So some popular explanation is indeed necessary. For the moment it is hard to expect CC licenses to have legal force, but in the long run they are beneficial for fostering an atmosphere of mutual respect and collaboration in the industry, as well as the spontaneous formation of industry norms.

My blog uses a CC license (BY-SA). More and more new-style blogs and information sites are using CC licenses—for example, 8btc uses the BY-NC-SA CC license—but in any case, CC licenses, especially in China, are still not very well known. What we are used to seeing at the bottom of webpages is still Copyright – All Rights Reserved.

So what exactly does the CC license mean, and what significance does it have? I’ll give a brief account.

First, of course, we need to understand the concept of “copyright.” Copyright, or authors’ rights, is obviously a product of the print era. On the one hand, booksellers could profit through the mass reproduction and sale of works; on the other hand, such reproduction and sales could be carried out entirely apart from the author. This meant that once a work entered circulation, the author might well be unable to obtain any share of the enormous profits generated by print media. Something about that always seemed off, didn’t it? So the laws concerning authors’ rights were established to protect the author’s own priority rights in the process of a work’s dissemination: printers needed the author’s authorization in order to reproduce and distribute it. Of course, more importantly, copyright also protected the interests of printers. Once the copyright was bought outright, they could enjoy profits for a long time. In addition, for readers, the one “genuine” edition provides a reliable standard copy, which both ensures reading quality and makes searching and citation easier.

Notice that I keep emphasizing the “print era.” I am not denying the significance of copyright, but its significance is historical: it is suited to a dissemination environment centered on printing technology (and perhaps one might include records, tapes, and so on). In the age of manuscripts, it was extremely difficult for a work to endure through the ages. Even those classic works that have enjoyed immortal renown found it hard to bring any income to their authors during the authors’ lifetimes. In order to increase the chances that their ideas would spread, people in ancient times were willing to abandon their own byline and attribute their writings to famous figures. There certainly were booksellers who distributed manuscripts for profit, but in the value of a manuscript, the act of copying itself accounted for a larger share, so whether one monopolized the distribution rights to a particular book had little bearing on the bookseller’s profit. Added to this, most manuscripts were not standardized, so there was no quality difference between genuine and pirated editions. Thus, from the perspectives of author, disseminator, and reader alike, there was no demand for copyright.

So what about in the Internet age? The speed and low cost of information transmission make it no longer so profitable to rely on selling the medium of information itself, but the wide dissemination of works can undoubtedly benefit the author, whether one seeks fame or profit or the promotion of academic exchange. The author no longer needs to attach himself to a particular publisher. For disseminators, of course, traditional publishers still need copyright, but emerging Internet media do not necessarily have to control copyright; free reposting can ultimately also bring traffic. For readers, open texts are easier to search and cite, and of course they are also more welcome.

But it is not right to give up copyright entirely either. In the Internet environment, we prefer a more open mode of dissemination, but if these dissemination processes are completely detached from the creators, that is not a good thing. For example, an author can gain fame from the free circulation of his work, but if his name is simply erased in the process of dissemination, where would that fame come from? A platform can gain traffic from the widespread reposting of content, but if the reposters do not preserve links, where will the traffic come from?

The key point is that the traditional concept of copyright is either complete control over copyright, the so-called “All Rights Reserved,” or else no copyright at all—for example, fifty or seventy years after the author’s death, the work enters the “public domain” and is no longer protected by copyright. But what we now need is a way to partially open copyright, according to certain rules.

The IT industry was clearly the pioneer of the Internet era, so it is hardly surprising that new forms of copyright were designed by the IT industry first. In fact, these new rules were originally initiated by the Free Software Foundation. Richard Stallman, the father of free software, launched the GNU project and founded the Free Software Foundation in the 1980s. Initially, the GNU project was mainly used for open-source licenses for free software such as Linux. The most popular was GPL (GNU General Public License), mainly applicable to software. When extended to ordinary documents, it became GFDL, namely the GNU Free Documentation License.

The basic idea of the GNU project is copyleft, a concept that obviously plays on copyright in a somewhat teasing way. There are many Chinese translations, such as author-left rights, anti-copyright, and “rights-responsibility,” among others. Personally, I prefer “rights-responsibility,” which, though it loses the teasing flavor, is more accurate. Rights and responsibilities are opposite in relation; what copyleft is opposite to copyright is not the right to disseminate, but the responsibility to disseminate. The disseminator no longer disseminates on the premise of obtaining rights; rather, he may disseminate on the premise of assuming responsibility.

In fact, copyleft and copyright are not contradictory; they are complementary. Based on copyright protection, we have “no reproduction without permission,” but the key lies in how “permission” is achieved. Copyleft still takes “no reproduction without permission” as its premise, but provides an open license. In other words, the “reproducer” no longer needs to wait to negotiate with the copyright holder in order to obtain authorization; rather, so long as he accepts the conditions specified in the license agreement, he can automatically complete the agreement and obtain authorization.

The copyleft concept proposed by the Free Software Foundation is a relatively strong one. It not only permits the reposting and copying of the complete content, but also allows the original text to be modified and expanded. However, the responsibility borne by the modifier is this: the new version must still retain the original license. In other words, documents based on GFDL still need to provide a GFDL license after dissemination and adaptation. This is the so-called “contagion.”

Such open rights to modify were difficult to realize in the print era, so much so that in China’s Copyright Law, the “right of modification” and the “right of attribution” are listed together as rights that cannot be licensed to others. But in the Internet environment, opening up the right to modify makes it possible for an indefinite number of people to collaborate together. In software, the classic achievements are open-source software such as Linux, Firefox, WordPress, and Bitcoin; in the realm of text, the greatest achievement is undoubtedly Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a product of the GFDL license, though in recent years it has also worked hard to achieve compatibility with CC licenses.

The CC license is also an extension that follows the copyleft idea. It is mainly designed for written works, though it also extends to images, music, and so on. It avoids some of the rigidities of GFDL and provides multiple combinations of rights and responsibilities, allowing creators to flexibly choose the licensing method best suited to their needs.

CC is short for Creative Commons. This is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001, and also the name of the licenses promoted by that organization. In mainland China it is translated as “Creative Commons,” and there are also translations such as “Creative Sharing” and “Shared Creativity.” “Creative Commons” seems a bit more accurate. CC is not a single license, but a plurality of licenses (licenses). In addition to providing six main licensing combinations, CC also offers different localized versions in accordance with the legal environments of different regions. Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan each have corresponding localization work.

CC licenses provide four main conditions: (table from Wikipedia)

Symbol	English	Abbrev.	Full name	Description
	Attribution	BY	署名	You may copy, distribute, exhibit, perform, screen, broadcast, or disseminate this work through an information network; you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
	NonCommercial	NC	NonCommercial Use	You may freely copy, distribute, display, and perform this work; you may not use this work for commercial purposes.
	NoDerivs	ND	No Derivatives	You may freely copy, distribute, display, and perform this work; you may not alter, transform, or modify this work.
	ShareAlike	SA	Share Alike	You may freely copy, distribute, display, and perform this work; if you alter, transform, or modify this work, you may distribute derivative works produced from this work only under the same licensing terms as this work.

Among these four conditions, “Attribution” is regarded as mandatory, while ND and SA are mutually exclusive. Combined together, they therefore yield six licensing terms:

 

Attribution (BY)
Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA)
Attribution-NoDerivs (BY-ND)
Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND)

In fact, there is also another term, namely to waive all rights and directly place the work into the public domain, marked CC0, but the main ones are the six above.

The “CC-BY-SA” license is similar to GFDL. If the SA clause is omitted, then the contagion effect is lost. For example, a work published by Zhang San under CC-BY can be freely adapted by Li Si; he only needs to indicate the source, after which he may use it however he likes. He can use it for profit, and he can also add other terms such as BY-NC. Of course, if a NoDerivs condition is added, then it is equivalent to granting only reposting rights: the reposter cannot alter the work’s original form, and therefore cannot change it into a new set of terms either. The reason SA and ND are contradictory is that SA is a requirement imposed on the modified part on the premise that a derivative has been made.

As for NC, non-commercial use, this is the most controversial clause, and in fact I myself do not quite accept this concept either. The key question is: what counts as non-commercial use? This is very hard to define clearly; in fact, even the official CC foundation has always been rather vague on this point. According to the official FAQ, commercial use emphasizes the user’s intent (primarily intended for or directed toward…), rather than the user’s status. That is to say, a non-profit organization may still be engaging in commercial use of a work, while a for-profit organization may also be making non-commercial use of it. But judging the user’s status is easy, whereas judging “intent” is difficult. CC says it cannot guide you in determining what is commercial and what is non-commercial; if you cannot figure it out, you should ask the copyright holder to clarify, or simply choose works that permit commercial use. (CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.)

You can see that CC is rather irresponsible here: if you can’t tell, then I can’t help either—go find a work whose terms you can understand. In actual disputes, many people argue that anything with advertisements counts as commercial use, and that works under NC licenses must not appear with ads. But this judgment is in fact somewhat self-deceptive: even without ads, many commercial websites quote CC works in order to increase traffic, and ultimately still for commercial purposes. In other cases, although there are ads on the page, the purpose of loading the CC work has nothing to do with ad revenue.

Actually, my own preferred interpretation is this: as long as you do not charge for this content, it counts as non-commercial use. For example, take China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI): if you have to pay a fee in order to download and read a paper, then of course that is commercial use. But so long as the content itself is free, and can be viewed without spending money, then it does not count as commercial use. This standard is relatively easy to judge, though to many people it seems far too broad.

The way to resolve ambiguity is either not to use the NC clause at all, or to add clear explanations when introducing the NC clause. After all, the CC licenses merely provide a model set of guiding terms; each creator can of course adjust them according to their own needs and issue their own license. For example, I suggest that those creators who stubbornly insist on non-commercial use should make it explicit whether all commercial organizations are forbidden to use it, whether pages with advertisements cannot use it, or whether it is enough simply not to charge for the content. In short, the CC licenses should be regarded as a model contract; creators cannot simply copy them wholesale without making things clear.

What one must always remember is that the creator is forever the owner of the work. A CC license is a set of authorization terms that the creator presents to distributors; it does not apply to the creator themselves. The creator can of course release the same work under multiple licenses at the same time, and can also “waive” rights for specific parties at any time—that is to say, “if the copyright holder permits, all of the above conditions may be waived.” For example, if I release a work under BY-NC-SA, I can also authorize certain commercial websites to use it. BY-NC-SA refers to the rules that those who use my work on the condition of accepting these terms must follow; but someone may also obtain my permission without accepting these terms.

Of course, once permission has already been granted, it cannot be revoked so long as the other party has not breached the agreement. For example, if I published an article last year under CC-BY and you reposted it, then this year I change the terms to CC-BY-NC-SA, but you do not need to alter anything; whatever was reposted may continue to be used as before, and I have no right to withdraw it.

But as I understand it, the agreement does not come into effect on one person’s side alone; rather, it is only when the user actually uses the work in accordance with the agreement that the agreement is deemed to have been reached and permission obtained. Therefore, those who reposted my article last year may continue to keep it, but those who come to use it only after I have changed the terms will need to comply with the new terms. Because of the inherent BY clause, even if you saw my old article elsewhere, you can and should find the article’s original source and check the latest license terms. After all, you need to obtain permission from the creator, not from the reposter.

Of course, CC licenses have many ambiguities and controversies, and their adjustment to the laws of different countries is far from complete. They themselves are also constantly being revised. At present, the rigor of CC licenses and their binding legal force are not very strong; more often than not, one still needs to appeal to mutual respect between authors and distributors.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.