By Chrystal Pickell Vandervest
Read time: 2 minutes

As you may know, at the heart of many open educational resources (OER) are Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow faculty to use, adapt, and remix content. The newly created resources further build upon the knowledge contained in other OERs, and then, that knowledge is shared with students.

You may not know that there’s so much more to Creative Commons than just the licenses.

To better understand Creative Commons, let’s travel back in time to the early days of the internet.

Creators were able to share and collaborate globally on a scale that hadn’t existed in the past. Copyright laws restricted this sharing, and tensions grew among creators and copyright laws around the world.

As tensions were rising, the 105th Congress of the United States of America passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) in 1998.

The CTEA amended current Federal copyright provisions to extend copyright terms from the life of the author plus 50 years after death to the life of the author plus 70 years after death. ¹

Items that were meant to become public domain would continue to be copyrighted for another 20 years.

Understandably, there were many who were upset by this new restriction on works entering the public domain.

In 1999, Eric Aldred (internet publisher) and Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor) filed a complaint in District Court to challenge the constitutionality of the CTEA. ²

A not-so-spoiler-alert . . . in 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the constitutionality of the Act. ²

In the midst of all of this, Lessig and others were inspired to create the nonprofit Creative Commons, and in 2002, the first Creative Commons licenses were published. Creators from all over the world gained the ability to share and build upon each other’s works. ³

Creative Commons has evolved since then and is now

• a set of legal tools (the licenses),
• a nonprofit organization,
• and a global network and movement.

Today, there are nearly 2 billion works across 9 million websites using Creative Commons licenses. ⁴ And, this year marks the launch of the organization’s GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) Certification. ⁵

The only certainty in the next 20 years is that Creative Commons will continue to change. The best way to keep up-to-date with changes and to be part of the change is to get involved.

• Join the CC Global Network (CCGN) ⁶
• Join one (or more) of the CC’s Network Platforms ⁶
  • Open Education Platform
  • Copyright Platform
  • Open GLAM Platform
• Attend the annual Creative Commons Summit

This article is the first in a series Chrystal Pickell Vandervest is writing as part of the Creative Commons certification course. The full collection of articles can be found on MCLS’s Creative Commons articles page.

“Creative Commons: Beyond the Licenses” by Chrystal Pickell Vandervest is licensed by MCLS under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Image Attributions

‘Justice’ by Creative Stall licensed under CC BY 3.0
‘three’ icon by Zach Bogart is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Sources

¹ ”S.505 – Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act”. by 105th Congress (1997-1998)
² “Eldred v. Ashcroft” from Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 3.0.
³ Enter Creative Commons/pg. 11. “Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM” by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.
⁴ Enter Creative Commons/pg. 13. “Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM” by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.
⁵ ‘We’re Launching the CC Open GLAM Program’ by Brigitte Vézina and Catherine Stihler. CC BY 4.0.
⁶ Enter Creative Commons/pg. 13. “Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM” by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.