CR2: Creative Commons

The Creative Commons rights-assignment tool is being developed as part of the CR2 DART workpackage. The goal of the CR2 work package is to reduce barriers to content acquisition by providing more rights options for non-science researchers such as Creative Commons copyright.

We identify our main target users as musicians and artists. Therefore, we choose the Australian Creative Resource Online (ACRO) system as our application platform which holds thousands of audio, video and still files created by students from the University of Queensland.

Several difficulties arise with the current ACRO system for authors when depositing their creative work into the repository:

• ACRO requires that all work be submitted by File Transfer Protocol (FTP) which is not a user friendly environment.
• The default license attached to each work submitted to the repository is creative commons attribution-Noncommercial. The author could not specify how others could use his/her work. For example, the author may like others to modify or sample part of his/her work for re-creation.
• Internet users could not search based on licence information. For example, users may want to retrieve all video files with a commercial licence attached.

This project addresses the above problems and aims to provide a user friendly platform to encourage authors to deposit their work into the repository. Promoting the copyright of content by Creative Commons actively fosters creativity and innovation through re-utilisation of existing works.

The features being developed include:

• online work submission
• creative commons license options
• search based on license information etc

About Creative Commons

All copyright reserved and no copyright reserved are two extremes of copyright. In the late 1980s, all works become copyrighted automatically at the moment of creation under US law. All copyright reserved protects the copyright of owners, however for copyright owners who want to allow others certain uses of their works, it is too restrictive. No right reserved provides freedom for others to use the work but can leave the copyright owners vulnerable to exploitation. Creative Commons offers creators a best-of-both-worlds approach. It defines a spectrum of copyright between full copyright (all rights reserved) and public domain (no copyright reserved). Creative Commons licenses allow content creators to retain their copyright while inviting certain uses of the work - a "some rights reserved" copyright.

There are four main protocols which can be applied with a Creative Commons license: Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works and Share Alike. For information on these aspects of Creative Commons, plese refer to the Creative Commons Licenses page.