Creative Commons Is Amazing
Creative Commons (CC) has done a lot to simplify and improve the insanity that is online copyright management. They get that you have to be a lawyer to write an effective license on your own and that the same goes for anyone considering using licensed content. That works well for big companies, and lawyers, but it really makes life unnecessary complicated for the rest of us.
Creative Commons fixed that. By creating different versions of every license, not only does a CC license work well in a legal context but it works well in a human context.
They are so smart that they even realized that some point in the future machines will have to be able to understand this stuff automatically and created a language specifically to express rights management in.
Some people like Creative Commons licenses; some people don't. Regardless of how you specifically feel about sharing, remixing, reusing, &c, I think you have to give credit to the amazing work that went into creating those licenses in the first place.
But Not Perfect
For all the great things Creative Commons has accomplished, I feel that they overlooked one important thing though: feedback to the original content creator. By looking at all of the license variants they provide, you can see the one-way nature of the communication about the usage of the CC-licensed content. Creative Commons, at the moment, seems to be focused on making sure that the consumers of content understand that said content contains CC-licensed material.
But what about the original creator?
I love creating things for all kinds of reasons. One of those reasons is that I like improving other peoples lives through those creations. If I make something that people like or find useful, it helps me to know that. By knowing what people like or find useful, I can put my energy into more of that kind of thing. The good feeling that comes from that knowledge also adds to my drive to continue creating new things; it's like money but better. The best part is that all it costs the consumer of those creations is a brief moment to say that they like something or that they want to use/reuse it.
If I could make one suggestion to the Creative Commons team, it would be to add a "two-way communication" version of each license.
Expanding on Creative Commons
Sadly I don't have the clout to drive Creative Commons at the moment. Happily, all the CC licenses are open to being remixed and so I can do it myself for the version of the license I like the most. I've taken the "Attribution 4.0 International" license and added a requirement that any sharing or reuse requires a message be sent to the original content creator to an email of the creator's choosing. That email should be "clearly indicated" alongside the license but I leave it up to the user of the license to choose what that means.
I'm using this new license for all of my content on this blog (including the modified license itself) and anyone who likes this idea is free to do the same. I've included both the license deed (human-readable) and legal code (lawyer-readable) below along with the email address to use to contact me. I haven't looked at creating a machine-readable version but will do so and update this page once I've worked it out.
Maybe if it catches on a bit the Creative Commons team will include a similar concept into the official CC licenses.
A Note About Versioning
Since I may create multiple versions of this license (updates to fix problems, for example) and Creative Commons may update their licenses (go from 4.0 to 5.0, for example), I'm wrapping both of those versions into a single version ID. Since this is version 1 of my license and it is an extension of version 4.0 of the CC license, I will label this version 1.4.0. If I were to make a 2nd version which still is an extension of version 4.0 of the CC license, it would be 2.4.0. Instead, if Creative Commons updated to 5.0 and I wanted to extend it in the same way as this first version does, it would be 1.5.0. Simple, no?
License for Content on mark-christensen.com Subdomains
All content on all mark-christensen.com subdomains (including but not limited to blog., info., and project.) published on or after April 03, 2016 14:27 GMT is covered by the Extended CC BY 4.0 License (version 1.4.0) until superceded by a future version of this document. For content published prior to April 03, 2016 14:27 GMT, refer to previous versions of this document.
Please notify me of any use of licensed content by sending an email to web.admin -at- mark-christensen.com (replace the -at- with @).
All versions of the Extended Creative Commons licenses are provided below.
Extended Creative Commons Licenses
- X CC BY 1.4.0 - Extended CC BY 4.0 License (version 1.4.0)