Creative Commons: fifth year anniversary

December marks a big anniversary, number five for Creative Commons. The CC has created a simple system that supports creators, enabling them to share their work as appropriate. As Lawrence Lessig describes in Free Culture, a CC license consists of three components: "a legal license, a human-readable description, and machine-readable tags" (283). The supported rights can be precisely defined by a creator, and can be seen as add-ons to the rights available under fair use. Lessig, in the same section, makes another point:

Creative Commons...aims to build a layer of content....Voluntary choice of individuals and creators will make this content available. And that content will in turn enable us to rebuild a public domain (283; emphasis mine).

In other words, the Creative Commons effort can be seen as a counter the federal government's enactment of more conservative copyright law, best reflected in the 1998 Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998). The intent of this law runs directly counter to the constitutional support for copyright as encoded in Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution, and is designed to benefit corporations at the expense of current, individual creators.