Copyrights and Creative Commons in SEE
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Copyright means, above all, the right of the author to define the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, while the license is a legal document used by the author to express those terms and conditions in a legally acceptable form. Therefore, each author can, in principle, decide that his/her work can be freely distributed or even used as public domain good. On the other hand, the contemporary practice is such that, unless the author explicitly defines the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, it is assumed that the terms would be: “All unauthorized copying, reproduction and public performance is strictly forbidden. All rights reserved”.
Creative Commons is an all-encompassing solution for licensing of works as publicly accessible and open contents. It simplifies the procedure for the author to legally define greater freedoms for the users, different from those restrictive invoked authomatically if the author doesn’t explicitly declare his will, having in mind taht such expression of will by the author, if done on one’s own, would demand a legally complicated procedure. The website creativecommons.org offers the authors possibility to chose which rights he/she wants to transfer and get a legally valid license that expresses the chosen terms and conditions in legally appropriate manner. It is also possible to enter the work into a registry or store it in a public archive on the internet, which makes it more accessible to users searching for free contents.
The democratic potential is, however, accompanied on the global level, with an opposite trend in the area of legal regulation and implementation mechanisms (for ex., copyright protection agencies, of which the best known are music rights agencies). Knowledge and ideas are treated exclusively as private property with exclusive rights of exploitation retained by the owners, while any unauthorized and uncontrolled use is prohibited and prevented with increasingly more efficient instruments. Such restrictive copyright and intellectual rights policy is suited primarily to those entities that base their business models on control and restriction of access to immaterial products, ideas: big entertainment industry companies, software industry, rich scientific institutions, etc., at the expense of those that, either as producers or as users may benefit from the free distribution (bloggers, less known artists...). Thus, in spite of possibility to access ever greater amount of knowledge and information, and in spite of the possibility to involve more people in their production, this development is prevented and the existing gaps are widened. Still, even in the most restrictive copyrights laws, it is evident that the validity of that protection in always time-limited: after 20, 50 or 70 years from the death of the author, the work moves into the public domain. In spite of the current trend to expand these terms beyond the limits listed above, its very existence proves that copyrights are viewed, after all, as public good, and that the main purpose of copyright is to establish a temporary monopoly for the author regarding use and setting terms and conditions of use of the works, purely to stimulate creative work, and not to establish a lasting property right similar to one existing in the field of material goods. CC intends to expand the space for free creation, its exchange and public accessibility for all types of contents that could be digitalized, through a legal mechanism compatible with the existing system of copyright and intellectual property rights legislation – using legally valid licenses that allow the author to open his/her work in various levels: from most restrictive – rights of reproduction and distribution, to maximum rights – public domain. This approach, both in terms of the philosophy and legal solution, first appeared with the free software movement in 1980’s, that first realized the negative trends and the possible consequences of the increasingly restrictive regulation of intellectual property in the field of software production. Namely, in this area the freedom to modify, adapt and integrate the whole programme or its elements, without restrictions, is essential for software development and the work of developers. With that goal in mind, the GNU General Public License was devised, used by the maker of a programme to allow everybody to freely copy, distribute and modify the programme, with the single obligation to offer the original or modified programme under the same terms and conditions. In that sense, Creative Commons is a continuation of the free software movement. It makes this idea of freedom more general in scope and adapts the license form to a wider area of intellectual production: music, film, video, photography, literature, design, scientific essays and works... Therefore, we can now speak about a movement for free culture or creative public good. Creative Commons localization is translation of licenses into the language of one country and their approximation to local legislation, so that they could function as legally valid expression of the author’s will in that country. It is part of the International Commons project, that has as its goal the harmonization of accessibility and provisions on free contents in as many countries in the world. Since 2002, the year CC was first established in the U.S., localization has been completed in a number of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Austria... In this area, the localization was completed in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia. In most countries of Southeast Europe, the legislation in the field of copyrights and intellectual property rights, as well as the instruments for its implementation remain relatively far from the level of restriction and efficiency common in the West. Paradoxically, the fact that there is no efficient prevention of copyright violations, combined with ICT expansion, creates a situation in which accessibility of digital contents is much greater than if efficient mechanisms for protection were in place. On the other hand, all SEE countries have the long-term perspective of integration and EU membership, a process that includes the harmonization of legislation with EU’s acquis communautaire, including the area of copyrights and intellectual property rights, which follows the lines of the global trend for increased restrictiveness. For that reason, the current situation of increased accessibility due to inefficient system can be seen as only temporary, while long-term, we need to find an alternative that is adapted to the context of settled legal system. Localization of Creative Commons solution can be one such alternative. For an overiview of the local situations regarding Copyrights protection and Creative Commons in the countries of the region, please read the following articles: Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Kosovo Macedonia Serbia and Montenegro |
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