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Creative Commons Nederland (CC-NL) is a
collaborative initiative between Nederland
Kennisland (Netherlands Knowledgeland), Waag
Society and the Institute for Information Law. The
purpose of this project is to develop, introduce and
promote Creative Commons licences in the Netherlands.
Background
to Creative Commons
Creative
Commons was founded in 2001 in the United States by
lawyers from Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School.
They developed licences to enable the distribution of
copyrighted works on the Internet, without violating the
authors' rights. These licences make the application of
copyright in the digital domain simple and more
transparent. Besides
the six standard licences, there are also more specific
Creative Commons licences, for example, for sampling of
music or film.
These
American Creative Commons licences have been translated
into Dutch by Prof.
Bernt Hugenholtz and Nynke Hendriks. On 18
June 2004, Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of
Creative Commons in the United States, officially
launched the Dutch licences.
IViR's
activities
To
enable further development of Creative Commons Nederland
in the future, it is necessary to conduct research into
the application of licences to specific sectors and
existing legal obstacles. The
research will concentrate on the following four research
questions:
On 23 August 2007
Buma/Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands launched a
pilot that will give members of Buma/Stemra the
opportunity to publish their music works under a
non-commercial Creative Commons licence. Composers and
lyricists, who to date have only been able to publish
their work under a Creative Commons licence, may now opt
to join Buma/Stemra and have this organisation collect
their royalties for commercial use of their work. With
this pilot Buma/Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands
seek to provide Dutch musicians with more opportunities
to promotie their own repertoire.
Collective
rights administration
Authors and
performing artists, particularly in the music sector,
have manifested their strong interest in using the
Creative Commons licences. However, this can conflict
with the contracts which collective rights management
societies normally use. Authors usually transfer the
rights on their existing and future works to the
collective rights management societies. This allows
rights organisations to exploit the rights on the works,
while the authors lose their say, making them unable to
offer their works under a CC-licence. Comparable
situations arise in the relationship between authors and
record labels.
Research
will be done on the way authors and artists can
distribute (some of) their works under a Creative
Commons-licence without undermining the collective
rights management system.
Cultural-heritage
organisations
Cultural-heritage
organisations that want to make their collections
publicly accessible must ask the copyright holders for
permission, unless a limitation on copyright is
applicable. However, these limitations on copyright
offer little room for such forms of re-use, while the
copyright holders of 'old' works are extremely difficult
to trace. A complication is that many cultural-heritage
institutions are copyright holders as well as (re-)users
of works in their collections. Research must be
conducted into other possible legal obstacles impeding
the use of Creative Commons-licences in this sector.
Guest
researcher Esther
Hoorn conducted research on how broadcasters,
archives, or museums can license their collections via
Creative Commons within the legal limits.
Comments
on this report are welcome and can be sent to Lucie
Guibault, project manager of the legal research into
Creative Commons licences.
Research
Content
There is a range of promising applications of
Creative Commons-licences or other open content models
in the field of science and research. The roles the
universities themselves can play should be examined. On
the one hand, universities, as employers of researchers,
lay claim to their own copyrights. At the same time, the
universities are large-scale users of scientific works
and therefore have a direct interest in the broad
application of open content models.
Lucie
Guibault conducts research into the role universities
should play concerning the application of Creative
Commons licences to scientific content. The draft
preliminary report of this research was discussed at the
KNAW
(Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Academic Colloquium "Open Content: New Models
for Accessing and Licensing Knowledge", which
was held in Amsterdam on 27-28 April 2006.
Government
Information
Government information is in principle protected
under Dutch copyright law. Mireille
van Eechoud and Brenda
van der Wal research the question whether Creative
Commons licensing is a suitable method to contribute to
the distribution and use of public sector information,
and what legal problems it involves. The study focuses
on the use of copyright for government information in
relation to existing access regimes based on freedom of
information principles, notably the Dutch Wet
Openbaarheid van Bestuur (Freedom of Information Act).
In this context regard will also be had for the recent
implementation of the European
Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector
information.
Publications
The Creative
Commons model seems an attractice instrument for
public sector bodies that seek to enhance
transparent access to their information, be it for
purposes of democratic accountability or re-use for
economic or other uses. This study examined that
hypothesis and highlights the major opportunities
and pitfalls of the Creative Commons model for
public sector information. It assesses where there
is a match between the creative commons model and
the principles of freedom of information law and the
Public Sector Information Directive (EC Directive
2003/98 on the re-use of public sector information)
as implemented in the new chapter V-A of the Dutch
Freedom of Information Act (Wet Openbaarheid van
Bestuur). The assessment was made not only at the
more principled, abstract level, but also at the
level of the individual licensing terms. It is
preceded by an analysis of government information as
subject of intellectual property rights, under the
Dutch Copyright Act and the Database Act.
-
P.B.
Hugenholtz,  Creative
Commons and Author's Rights: Les extrèmes se
touchent, lecture given at Duke
Law School, 24 October 2005.
The powerpoint presentation can be found here.
Conceived from
radically different visions of copyright,
American-bred Creative Commons and Old Europe-style
authors' rights (droit d'auteur) have more in common
than initially meets the eye. Focusing on the rights
and freedoms of creators, both systems recognize
certain inalienable moral rights, such as a right to
attribution and a right of integrity. Moreover, for
both systems to achieve their professed goals, it is
vital that copyright in works of authorship remain
with the actual creators, and not be transferred to
the media companies or collecting societies that
wish to exploit them. Therefore, certain statutory
limits to freedom of contract aimed at preventing
(overly) broad grants of rights are required. Strong
author-protective contract rules currently exist in
many traditional authors' rights countries, such as
France and Germany, and may serve as examples for
the United States.
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