Abusive Commons

I was looking forward to an academic discussion about the use of Creative Commons today but other things got in the road.  So, I’m going to blog my thoughts and I’m sure that I’ll hear back, based upon my opinions.

For a while now, I’ve been really concerned about a number of things and one could be described as the “low hanging fruit”.

There are a number of free applications that seem to becoming viral in the education space, for no particular reason.  I keep waiting for the “Wordle Across the Curriculum” document, for example.  Not to pick on Wordle; it’s a fine application and its concepts used to be one of the higher end assignments that I could give to a computer science class.  It was easy to differentiate with the students and they would motivate each other by their efforts.  In a pre-buzzword era, we might even get into a discussion about scaffolding.

Now, I’m seeing people using these easy tools for some of the simplest reasons.  Unfortunately, many of them tend to be cosmetic.  Recently, I ran into an assignment that had so many marks for inclusion of video, so many for graphics, so many for transitions, … and there was no mention that I saw of content!  It was an English class and this was the culmination of a novel study.

Creative Commons is a terrific concept.  It a way for innovators, creators, producers of great through to share their gift with others.

What I’m seeing happening more though is an abuse of that.  Certain permissions under the Creative Commons allow you to remix, display, or otherwise make things your own, or make it look like it’s your own with proper attribution.  If you’re a web grazer, you see it all the time.  In a blog, there will be a photo or image to go with an entry.  Then, if you look really closely in the fine print at the bottom, an attribution to the fact that someone else created it and place it on Flickr or elsewhere.

This is hardly fair to the original creator of the work.  If their content is good enough to display, it’s good enough to display with pride and proper credit.  But, I wonder why at all.  So often, you see photos or clipart added after the fact as if the entry is unfinished without a picture.

Now we get to the low hanging fruit.  Whatever happened to taking your own cell phone or camera or copy of CorelDRAW! and creating your own original production.  Doing that impresses me.  It’s your work; it’s now a complete package.  There may well be a time when you don’t have the appropriate image and properly including a Creative Commons entry or leaving it blank might be the way to go.

Whilst on this tirade, I would encourage people to learn, read, and truly understand what you’re doing when you put a Creative Commons license on your work.  Think through the implications and be prepared when someone does something with your work that you’re not going to like.  And, for goodness sakes, take a look at the Creative Commons for your own country when you’re going to attach this to your work.  Just like there are differences between Fair Use and Fair Dealing (really?), you need to look and understand what the Creative Commons license that you’re applying means in your country and the limitations and benefits that it provides.

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one concerned about this.  Read from WindsorDi’s blog as well.

So, I would implore you to reach higher.  Let’s get back to creating, innovating and producing.

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