Week 9 Tutorial Task and TuteSpark - Essay Planning

We’re drawing close to the end of another Semester of study. In Week 12, I will be posting an academic essay on How Jaime Sees It about the Creative Commons and how it differs from other forms of copyright. Since completing the Week 7 TuteSpark, this topic was the simple choice. A slightly excessive web-trawling expedition for that task set up my preliminary research for this essay.

The most interesting journal articles I came across approached the issue of licensing in a more balanced, logical way than expected: benefits as well as the lesser known drawbacks of using the Creative Commons were presented, including the irrevocability of CC licenses.

Articles that I foresee forming the core of my research from include the following:

- David Bollier’s Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2008);

- Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21^st Century (2010) by Laura Gordon-Murnane;
- Zachary Katz’s The Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing (2006);

- George Cheliotis’ From Open Source to Open Content: Organization, Licensing and Decision Processes in Open Cultural Production (2009); and

- (despite the ludicrously long title) Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law (2007) by Cheliotis, Warren Chik, Ankit Guglani and Giri Kumar Tayi.

Together, I feel that these articles represent an historically comprehensive, philosophically sensitive and balanced cross-section of recent academic works. I would like to explore in more depth the place of the Creative Commons within the wider context of the Open Source Movement and the future of cultural dissemination, including the broader application of the ‘Commons philosophy’ to other spheres of society.

In my research I also stumbled across several mentions of the application of the Creative Commons beyond the protection of works of art, literature, popular culture, and the other usual suspects. Of note are the Science Commons, which are perceived by some to be an answer to issues with gaining access to research and studies for future applications; perhaps to foster greater scientific collaboration worldwide and unlock some of the potential of technological and scientific know-how for the good of mankind. A brief overview of these will likely appear in my essay.

Reference List

Bollier, D. (2008). Viral spiral: How the commoners built a digital republic of their own. New York: New Press.

Cheliotis, G. (2009). From open source to open content: Organization, licensing and decision processes in open cultural production. Decision Support Systems, 47(1), 229-244.

Cheliotis, G., Chik^, W., Guglani, A., & Kumar Tayi, G. (2007). Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law [Electronic version]. Retrieved September 27, 2010, from http://web.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2007/805/CreateCommExp.pdf

Gordon-Murnane, L. (2010). Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century. Online, 34(1), pp 18-21.

Katz, Z. (2006). The Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing. IDEA – The Intellectual Property Law Review, 46(3), 391-413.