You may or may not notice upon looking at this website that there’s a little ©-esque “CC” badge on the bottom right-hand side of the page – though it’s not regular copyright, it’s a Creative Commons licence. This means that for all the content on this blog, I’m able to keep a copyright of my own work but allow for others to “copy and distribute” provided they attribute it to me.
So, what exactly is Creative Commons and why should (or shouldn’t) it be on any blog or website?
Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation, goes by the mantra, spearheaded by Lawrence Lessig, “share, remix, reuse – legally”. That is, allowing individuals the right to apply a protective license to their work depending on the levels of usage they want to permit for other users. As Lessig describes, it aims to give the individual “a control on creativity and innovation” and ability to “build-upon” the work of others in a legal way. There are various licensing options which aim to cater for the differing needs of individual users – though at the core of the idea is sharing.
Certainly, there is great value in this idea – old-school copyright laws need to be adapted to suit the layered style of the internet. Though, personally I was a little hesitant at first to have a CC licence on my blog because for one, it never occurred to me that anybody would want to “reproduce” the content posted on here in anyway. And secondly, I disagreed with some of the wider implications of such licensing ideas for professional artists on the internet. Putting this whole debate on the fashion page, let’s look at the issue as it stands in this niche.
It’s the nature of many amateur fashion blogs to re-post professional photographs or photographs of other bloggers to illustrate admiration or to add appropriate visuals to their respective posts. Likewise, if you were to create original content, it would be reasonable 
to allow it to be reproduced on another blog – provided of course it is attributed to the original site. However, although this idea caters nicely for amateur blogs because essentially it provides free advertising via attribution links and an opportunity to gain more readers, it’s a slightly different story for professionals who use the internet as a platform to distribute their work. Take for example famed street fashion photographer Scott Schuman from The Sartorialist. Schuman has his own copyright rules on his site which state that no content of his can be reproduced anywhere without his permission. He has argued that blogs (such as Le Fashion and Knight Cat) who simply re-post people’s content are essentially stealing – I direct you to this vest declaring “there is a special place in hell for fashion bloggers.”
Artist and writer, Armin Medosch is critical of CC licensing for a similar reason. He adopts the Eric B and Rakim line of argument that he would like to be Paid In Full for his published work (see video below!). That is, the current CC structure disregards “revenue models” for “cultural producers” – writers, artists, musicians, photographers and the like – who put their work out for free. This frustration manifests because large corporations such as Flickr (which uses CC licensing) make a fortune from user-generated content, whereas the original author gains nothing in an economic sense. CC advocates argue, conversely, that the licensing options on Flickr in fact provide photographers with an “easy” way of sharing their photos on their own terms. Medosch isn’t sold. He concludes that within the current parameters of the CC model, there is little “respect” for the cultural producers who make such content.
With both sides of the arguments considered, as I mentioned earlier, I did decide on having the least restrictive CC licence for my blog.
The main reason being that I’m not a professional rather an amateur who would be quite happy (and flattered!) to have someone re-use the content on my blog provided they attribute me. This means anything from my site can be “remixed” and any such re-distribution of content would be essentially free advertising for me (of course this does run the risk of certain aspects being portrayed in an unfavourable way). Granted, if my livelihood was being invested in a blog – which is the case for many artists and musicians – I would certainly view the CC idea in a different light.
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[All other images by Steven Miesel for Italian Vogue – I thought they were kind of appropriate; models being arrested…copyright infringements…yeah okay, it’s a bit of a tenuous link…] .
This Is Not Vogue. 
Posted on May 17, 2010
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