Creative Commons Issues an Update to its Copyright License Suite
After more than two years of community discussions and many drafts, the nonprofit Creative Commons has released a new version of its popular copyright license suite. These licenses allow rightsholders to release some of the exclusive rights associated with copyright while retaining others, in a way that’s easy for re-users, indexable by computers, and that stands up to legal review in many countries.
Version 4.0 accomplishes some ambitious goals, but sticks to the spirit of earlier licenses, so that it shouldn’t disrupt existing uses. In several places, the text has been clarified to better reflect the way the public uses the licenses in practice. The attribution requirements, for example, have been slightly adjusted to better accommodate the way re-users are typically providing attribution, by expressly allowing attribution to come in the form of a link to a separate “credits” page.
Among the most notable changes, version 4.0 breaks with the earlier practice of “porting” licenses to different jurisdictions, and is now designed to work all over the world. In the same vein, Creative Commons will provide official translations of the license deeds so that licensors and licensees can read the text in the local languages.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
After more than two years of community discussions and many drafts, the nonprofit Creative Commons has released a new version of its popular copyright license suite. These licenses allow rightsholders to release some of the exclusive rights associated with copyright while retaining others, in a way that’s easy for re-users, indexable by computers, and that stands up to legal review in many countries.
