Leadership Laboratory

Leadership Lab: Intellectual Property Series

This series of essays can help the IT manager learn how to identify and protect intellectual property and intangible assets.

Trademark Infringement - The Likelihood of Confusion - Updated October 27th, 2008
Valuation of Intellectual Property Case Study - IPWatchdog.com -
What is Intellectual Property - March 14th, 2007
Creative Commons and Intellectual Property - May 1st, 2007
What Is a Patent? - April 7th, 2007
Copyright - April 7th, 2007
Digital Rights Management - April 7th, 2007
Trademark and Brand - April 7th, 2007
Trade Secrets - April 7th, 2007
The Value of IP - April 7th, 2007
Licensing and Franchising - April 3rd, 2007
10 Steps to Protect IP - March 13th, 2007

Creative Commons and Intellectual Property

May 1st, 2007
By Stephen Northcutt


According to Tim Wu,[1] a Columbia University law professor, there is a new force that impacts authors of material, and Google is at the center of it: "Google has become the new ground zero for the "other" culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California's cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control."[2]

The famous book, The Long Tail,[3] by Chris Anderson,[4] points out these two major perspectives change how the creators of content feel about copyright. "At the top of the curve, the studios, major labels and publishers defend their copyright fiercely, in the middle, the domain of independent labels and academic presses, it's a gray area. Further down the tail, more firmly in the noncommercial zone, an increasing number of content creators are choosing explicitly to give up some of their copyright protections."[5] "Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."[6]

Let's take a look at Wikipedia's write up on some rights reserved. They are:
How well this will hold up in courts of law, since this is a fairly new idea, remains to be seen, but case law will be developed as we see from, "On March 9, 2006 the District Court of Amsterdam, judging in summary proceedings, decided the first court case in the Netherlands involving the validity of a Creative Commons license. Local media celebrity, Adam Curry (see http://curry.podshow.com/?p=49) had published photos of his family on www.flickr.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. The photos also carried the notice 'This photo is public'. The Dutch weekly Weekend, a gossip magazine, had reproduced four photos in a story on Curry's children without seeking Curry's prior permission."[8]

Publishers are starting to receive requests to release material under the Creative Commons license. For instance, here is a section of a letter to Republican National Committee posted on lesig's blog, "We, the undersigned, request that the Republican National Committee publicly urge state parties and other Republican debate sponsors to specify in debate contracts that video footage will be put into the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license - so that after the debate, the video will be free for anyone to access, edit, and share with others with proper attribution."[9]

Of course, there are concerns. This BusinessWeek blog talks about finding a cool picture on Flickr, the photo site in the Dutch lawsuit mentioned earlier, but was unwilling to use it since BusinessWeek is clearly commercial. However, Heather Green[10] goes on to say, "But what if I'm not BusinessWeek. What if I want to use it on my personal blog, but I use AdWords on my blog? Isn't that also a commercial use? I wonder if people who choose some rights reserved like this realize that they are actually limiting it this much."[11] Perhaps, no one has put it quite so well as Frankston, Reed, and Friends: "If someone were to repeat any of my ideas, anywhere (for example, the "end-to-end argument") they would be infringing my copyright in that expression, and probably my trademark. If you were to want to build on that idea, or criticize it, you'd have to find a different way of expressing it. And of course, if the different expression cites my work, a mere rewording shows that you almost certainly derived the new expression as a translation, which is a copy, so it may indeed be insufficient (because translation is protected by copyright, as well) to protect yourself from my suing you."[12] So, the some rights reserved is an interesting modification on the limited monopoly rights granted by copyright, but depending on the restrictions may not work in the real world, so we will have to see. These articles get updated every year or so, so it will be interesting to see how things are going then.

For now, in the course we author and teach, Management 512: SANS Security Leadership Essentials For Managers,[13] we suggest the wise information security manager may want to consider the body of intellectual property that your organization currently has under copyright; and, if you feel that some of it might benefit your organization by favoring authorial exposure rather than authorial control, then consider a test where you mark some of the material with a creative commons mark. As you can see in this article, if you try to keep too much authorial control, it will impact the point of the exercise, to put your material to work for your organization. So, consider the Attribution by would be our advice. The Creative Commons folks make it easy; you select a license,[14] they generate the HTML[15] and then you put that in your web page. In text, the license would look like this, "You are free to share X” to copy, distribute and transmit the work, Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.[16]

And yes, that is the license we would prefer be used to govern this web page.

References:
1. http://www.timwu.org/writings.html
2. http://www.slate.com/id/2128094/
3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401302378/bookstorenow600-20
4. http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html
5. The LONG TAIL, Chris Anderson, ISBN 1-4013-0237-8
6. http://creativecommons.org/
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses
8. http://www.creativecommons.ca/blog/archives/2006/03/14/dutch-court-upholds-creative-commons-license/
9. http://www.lessig.org/blog/
10. http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/techteam.html#heather_green
11. http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2006/01/photos_whats_ri.html
12. http://www.satn.org/archive/2003_04_27_archive.html
13. http://www.sans.org/training/description.php?tid=452
14. http://creativecommons.org/license/
15. http://creativecommons.org/license/results-one?q_1=2&q_1=1&field_commercial=yes&field_derivatives=n&field_jurisdiction=&field_format=Text&lang=en&language=en&n_questions=3
16. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/