---
title: "Creative Commons"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:48:53.809037+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Bassel Khartabil ===
Bassel Khartabil was a Palestinian Syrian open source software developer who served as a project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria. On March 15, 2012, he was detained by the Syrian government in Damascus at Adra Prison for no crime. On October 17, 2015, the Creative Commons Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for Bassel Khartabil's release. In 2017, Bassel's wife received confirmation that Bassel had been killed shortly after she lost contact with him in 2015.

== Evolution of CC licenses ==
All current CC licenses (except the CC0 Public Domain Dedication tool) require attribution (attributing the authors of the original creative works), which can be inconvenient for works based on multiple other works. Critics feared that Creative Commons could erode the copyright system over time, or allow "some of our most precious resources – the creativity of individuals – to be simply tossed into the commons to be exploited by whomever has spare time and a magic marker." Critics also worried that the lack of rewards for content producers would dissuade artists from publishing their work, and questioned whether Creative Commons would enable the commons that it aimed to create.
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig countered that copyright laws have not always offered the strong and seemingly indefinite protection that today's law provides. Rather, the duration of copyright used to be limited to much shorter terms of years, and some works never gained protection because they did not follow the now-abandoned compulsory format. The maintainers of Debian, a Linux distribution known for its strict adherence to a particular definition of software freedom, rejected the Creative Commons Attribution License prior to version 3 as incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which might, due to ambiguity, be covering more than DRM) and its requirement that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author. Version 3.0 of the Creative Commons licenses addressed these concerns and, except for the non commercial and no-derivative variants, are considered to be compatible with the DFSG.
Kent Anderson, writing for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, criticized CC as being grounded on copyright principles and not really departing from it, and as being more complex and complicating than the latter – thus the public does not scrutinize CC, reflexively accepting it as one would a software license – while at the same time weakening the rights provided by copyright. Anderson ends up concluding that this is the point, and that "Creative Commons receives significant funding from large information companies like Google, Nature Publishing Group, and RedHat", and that Google money is especially linked to CC's history; for him, CC is "an organization designed to promulgate the interests of technology companies and Silicon Valley generally".

=== CC license proliferation ===
According to Mako Hill, Creative Commons has established a range of licenses tailored to meet the different protection interests of authors of creative works, rather than forcing a single forced standard as a "base level of freedom" that all Creative Commons licenses must meet, and with which all licensors and users must comply. "By failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the sand, CC is a missed opportunity. ...CC has replaced what could have been a call for a world where 'essential rights are unreservable' with the relatively hollow call for 'some rights reserved.'" He also argued that Creative Commons enables license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible.
The Creative Commons website states, "Since each of the six CC licenses functions differently, resources placed under different licenses may not necessarily be combined with one another without violating the license terms." Works licensed under incompatible licenses may not be recombined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the copyright owner. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation stated in 2005 that he could not support Creative Commons as an activity because "it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom", that freedom being "the freedom to share, noncommercially, any published work". Those licenses have since been retired by Creative Commons.

=== License uses ===

Creative Commons is only a service provider for standardized license text, not a party in any agreement. No central database of Creative Commons works is controlling all licensed works and the responsibility of the Creative Commons system rests entirely with those using the licences. This situation is, however, not specific to Creative Commons. All copyright owners must individually defend their rights and no central database of copyrighted works or existing license agreements exists. The United States Copyright Office does keep a database of all works registered with it, but absence of registration does not imply absence of copyright, and CC licensed works can be registered on the same terms as unlicensed works or works licensed under any other licences.
Although Creative Commons offers multiple licenses for different uses, some critics suggested that the licenses still do not address the differences among the media or among the various concerns that different authors have. Lessig wrote that the point of Creative Commons is to provide a middle ground between two extreme views of copyright protection – one demanding that all rights be controlled, and the other arguing that none should be controlled. Creative Commons provides a third option that allows authors to pick and choose which rights they want to control and which they want to grant to others. The multitude of licenses reflects the multitude of rights that can be passed on to subsequent creators.

=== Non-commercial use licenses ===