Open Licensing Promotes Culture and Learning. That’s Why EFF Is Upgrading its Creative Commons Licenses.

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At EFF, we’re big fans of the Creative Commons project, which makes copyright work in empowering ways for people who want to share their work widely. EFF uses Creative Commons licenses on nearly all of our public communications. To highlight the importance of open licensing as a tool for building a shared culture, we are upgrading the license on our website to the latest version, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Open licenses like Creative Commons are an important tool for sharing culture and learning. They allow artists and creators a simple way to encourage widespread, free distribution of their work while keeping just the rights they want for themselves—such as the right to be credited as the work’s author, the right to modify the work, or the right to control commercial uses.

Without tools like Creative Commons, copyright is frequently a roadblock to sharing and preserving culture. Copyright is ubiquitous, applying automatically to most kinds of creative work from the moment they are “fixed in a tangible medium.” Copyright carries draconian penalties unknown in most areas of U.S. law, like “statutory damages” with no proof of harm and the possibility of having to pay the rightsholder’s attorney fees. And it can be hard to learn who owns a copyright in any given work, given that copyrights can last a century or more. All of these make it risky and expensive to share and re-use creative works, or sometimes even to preserve them and make them accessible to future generations.

Open licensing helps culture and learning flourish. With many millions of works now available under Creative Commons licenses, creators and knowledge-seekers have reassurance that these works of culture and learning can be freely shared and built upon without risk.

The current suite of Creative Commons licenses has thoughtful, powerful features. It’s written to work effectively in many countries, using language that can be understood in the context of different copyright laws around the world. It addresses legal regimes other than copyright that can interfere with free re-use of creative materials, like database rights, anti-circumvention laws, and rights of publicity or personality.

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