Creative Commons comes to the UK

The Creative Commons is finalising the UK versions of its innovative content licences, one step towards the organisation's goal of reinventing copyright and intellectual property law across the world.

The licences for England and Wales, which are finished and presently undergoing a final community review, will be available on the Creative Commons UK website in a few days. The Scottish versions are not yet complete but should be within a few weeks. At this time no licenses are available exclusively for Northern Ireland.

Originally the brainchild of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in the US, the non-profit Creative Commons has developed a flexible alternative to traditional copyright law which allows the content creator to choose which protections or rights he would like applied to his work. The US licences are now undergoing the process of being adapted to local legal jurisdictions around the world.

Damian Tambini, UK project lead for Creative Commons, told silicon.com the UK licences will be quite similar to the US versions: "In porting the licences, we don't change the spirit of the licence... What we've done for the licences is to make entirely sure that spirit will be recognised in a UK court."

One difference, for instance, is that the English/Welsh licences do not allow the content creators to waive their moral right, which is allowed in the US. Because of these adaptations the English/Welsh licences, which took a volunteer team 16 months to develop, are a better option than the US versions for anyone living in England or Wales. Likewise, the Scottish licenses would be the best option for anyone living in Scotland.

Speaking at a launch event for the licences last night in London, Tambini said: "The legal work on the licences is done. The next phase is more difficult - to get people to use the licences."

Creative Commons has seen interest in the UK primarily from galleries, museums, educational institutions and the public sector - organisations not interested in making money from selling their works.

Perhaps the greatest ally has been the BBC, which developed a licence very similar to the Creative Commons for its Creative Archive, a repository of BBC content it will make available to the public for non-commercial use. The two licences are so close, explained Tambini, that people will be able to merge Creative Archive content with Creative Commons content.

Another big vote of support has come from communications regulator Ofcom, which has recommended to the UK government that the Creative Commons licence be used for a potential 'public service publisher' which would commission public service content.

"Because of the BBC and interest in the public sector [the UK] is in some ways ahead of other countries," Tambini said.

While the licences are a significant accomplishment, it's clear Creative Commons has loftier goals when it comes to affecting copyright and intellectual property law across the world. "There's an opportunity for a new form of licensing to help to educate the public about intellectual property and make transparent to people who want to use material [that] it's legal," Tambini said.

"There's a chance that we could develop a much more responsible culture about use and reuse of content," he continued.

Christian Ahlert, internet projects officer at the Oxford Internet Institute and a member of the Creative Commons team, said the licences are "about getting people to think different" about intellectual property and "about keeping access to information and knowledge open".

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and speaker at last night's launch event, emphasised the overriding importance of supporting Creative Commons and other innovative solutions to handling intellectual property rights. "If we fail in this we will cease to be humans in some vital way," he said. "We will fail spiritually and also economically."