Creative Commons

Creative Commons is an organization that values the legal sharing of creative work. Enabling the modification of copyright terms and licensing, Creative Commons gives the public access to view, share, and modify another’s work in ways that best suits the creator. This is to say that if a content creator only wishes to allow their work to be used by the public and not for commercial use, copyright terms are adjusted in order to protect both the creator and the person using the work found on Creative Commons. This platform for content sharing, stores a wide variety of mediums such as images, audio, video, and even academic material available for public and legal use.

Creative Commons allows a less ambiguous and safer understanding of ownership and copyright. Regarding the subjects and of a work, utilizing Creative Commons, there is a direct relationship between the content creator, or owner, and the person utilizing their medium. This platform that helps manage a middle ground between the two and allows for owners to share their content and those who want to use it on a permission-based relationship. Regarding copyright, I believe Creative Commons’ shift from “all-rights-reserved” to “some-rights-reserved” system of copyright also helps to create a safe space where people are able to use the content available and do not have to maneuver their way around copyright terms in fear of abusing an owners’ content.

This idea of varied copyright terms is a relatively new concept. In the case of Gone With the Wind, a work of Sherrie Levine and Michael Mandiberg, the copyright laws were extremely strict in comparison to the Creative Commons’ terms available today. These strict laws enforced that the duplication and modification of this work was clearly illegal and an infringement of copyright laws. If, hypothetically, Levine and Mandiberg were to released Gone With the Wind in modern day, the use of Creative Commons would allow copyright terms that were less strict and, for example, the creation of a sequel would not violate such laws.

Regarding the protection to the right of publicity, Creative Commons does not afford this. Any media form shared on Creative Commons is viewable and usable by the public. Because of the terms agreed upon by utilizing this medium, the right of publicity is not protected.

In the case of Bela Lugosi, the original actor of Universal Pictures
Company’s film Dracula, in which his death left question as to the licensing agreements of the character, copyright laws were questioned and challenged. In the year 1966, Lugosi’s widow and son filed complaints against Universal Pictures Company stating that they, as heirs to Lugosi, disapproved of the appropriation of Dracula and stated that any of Universal’s profit gain regarding these appropriations belonged to them. Creative Commons at this time, as stated before when discussing Gone With the Wind, did not exist however the current existence of this platform eliminates a number of copyright terms and issues, such as the Lugosi case.

Because Creative Commons is a space where content can be modified and used in various ways, the owner of content cannot predict what ways his or her content will be modified and construed. In Sturken and Cartwright’s (2009) text Practices of Looking, John David Viera is mentioned when discussing the emotional or meaningful attachment that can exist between viewers and content. Discussing Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother, it is discussed that there is a blatant “lack of ability to predict and control the meanings and uses of [an] image as it is reproduced and circulated in different contexts” (Sturken & Cartwright, 2009). Whether this inability to predict future meaning is reproduced work is positive or negative is unforeseeable however Creative Commons allows for Viera’s ideologies of constant change to hold true.

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Cartwright, L., & Sturken, M. (2009). Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc.