Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, January 06, 2005

On the significance of Creative Commons

Rainer Kuhlen and Jochen Brüning, Creative Commons (CC) – für informationelle Selbstbestimmung, gegen den Trend des Urheberrechts/Copyright als Handelsrecht; oder: Chancen für einen innovativen Drei-Stufen-Test? A preprint. In German but with this English-language abstract: 'Creative commons (CC), together with the Open access and the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) initiatives, has in a very short time become a signal that there are alternatives to the dominant commercialization of knowledge and information and to the exploitation of authors of creative work. More systematically formulated: CC aims at reversing the world-wide trend of understanding copyright (including the European legal tradition of authors rights) primarily as a trade law. CC's objective is to rebind the rights on intellectual works to the authors not to the content industry. CC is thus an important contribution for saving authors' information autonomy.' (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)