Creative Commons: The Fair Game Of Licensing

Two things that have concerned the music industry have been sampling and distribution of unauthorized work. In my line of business, this would be important in getting the word out with USB distribution. And the musical content that would be on these flash drives. My company would look to expand to other artists beyond the local area and connect with those different areas. However, some of these artists would use associations that would allow it. Therefore, we take a look at Creative Commons; a non-profit that is based on the use of sharing copyrighted work.

Creative Commons describes their organization as the following:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

With this in mind, the legal tools to for others to re-use and re-mix music or any other art forms is endless. My company would not go as far as providing this an option to the patrons that we would deal with. We would basically reach out to this non-profit association to see if there's any artists linked to it that would like to have their music distributed through the service we provide.

Also it seems that Creative Commons not only deals with the works of artists. It also deals in the world of education and science. The association is fairly new and started in the early 2000's. Here's a timeline of how the who organization and its different branches were divided for usage:

Founding
Founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, CC is led by a Board of Directors comprised of thought leaders, education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists.

Creative Commons licenses
In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public. Creative Commons developed its licenses — inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) — alongside a Web application platform to help you license your works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions; or dedicate your works to the public domain.

In the years following the initial release, Creative Commons and its licenses have grown at an exponential rate around the world. The licenses have been further improved, and ported to over 50 jurisdictions.

Science
Since 2005, Creative Commons has undertaken projects to build commons-based infrastructure for science through identifying and lowering unnecessary barriers to research, crafting policy guidelines and legal agreements, and developing technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.

Education
Creative Commons also works to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials, with dedicated projects in this field since starting in 2007.

Global infrastructure for sharing
Creative Commons licenses, public domain tools, and supporting technologies have become the global standard for sharing across culture, education, government, science, and more.

I think its safe to say that Creative Commons definitely bridges the gap of sharing work with others. Hoping to achieve some sort of middle ground between people who want permission to use others works and people who grant that permission. This could be the result of having a level of respect amongst peers who want to avoid illegal use of copyrighted works. I would definitely like to connect my company with this organization in order to gain some sort of knowledge on working with different artists and gaining their permission for distributing their work.