Along with an increasing number of digital scholarships, open access became a preferred, more affordable model for scholarly communication in the US.[1] In particular, digital humanists envision a sharing culture that digital contents and tools can be widely distributed through open access licenses.[2] Creative Commons (CC) licenses, with their promise to provide simple ways to grant permissions to creative works, became top options for many digital humanities to handle intellectual property rights in the US.
However, Creative Commons is not a panacea for managing the intellectual property rights of digital scholarship. Digital humanities projects usually consist of complicated components and their intellectual property rights involve various licenses and stakeholders. With misunderstandings of intellectual property and CC licenses, many scholars are not fully aware of the implications of using CC licenses, which cannot provide legal solutions to all intellectual property rights issues. The increasingly popular application and commercialization of digital humanities projects in the US further complicate the issue.
Based on case studies and influential lawsuits involving the topic in the US, this article critically investigates the limitations of using CC licenses and recommends that academic librarians provide scholars with more sophisticated suggestions on using CC licenses as well as providing education on intellectual property rights in general.
NOTES
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3. Elizabeth Joan Kelly, "Rights Instruction for Undergraduate Students: Needs, Trends, and Resources," College & Undergraduate Libraries 25, no. 1 (2018): 1-16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2016.1275910
4. Daniel Hickey, "The Reuse Evangelist: Taking Ownership of Copyright Questions at Your Library," Reference & User Services Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2011): 9-11;“Research Guides: Image Resources: Creative Commons Images,”Creative Commons Images -Image Resources -Research Guides at UCLA Library,accessed April 28, 2019,https://guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=180361&p=1185834; “Finding Public Domain & Creative Commons Media: Images,”Research Guides,accessed April 28, 2019, https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=310751&p=2072816 and Harvard are two good examples.
5. Lewin-Lane et al., "The Search for a Service Model of Copyright Best Practices in Academic Libraries," Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship 2, no. 2 (2018): 1-24. Harvard.For example, when conducting a literature review of the copyright education in academic libraries to search for best practices, does not discuss any limitation of CC licensesin this article.
6. Zachary Katz, "Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing," Idea: The Intellectual Property Law Review 46, no. 3 (2006): 391-413.
7. Eric E.Johnson,"Rethinking Sharing Licenses for Entertainment Media," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 26, no. 2 (2008): 391-440.
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10. Herkko Hietanen, “The Pursuit of Efficient Copyright Licensing: How Some Rights Reserved Attempts to Solve the Problems of All Rights Reserved,” Lappeenranta University of Technology, 2008.
11. Christa Engel Pletcher Burger, “Are Publicity Rights Gone in a Flash?: Flickr, Creative Commons, and the Commercial Use of Personal Photographs,” Florida State Business Review 8(2009):129, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1476347.
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36, “Creative Commons—Attribution 4.0 International—CC BY 4.0.”
37. “Why I’m Giving up on Creative Commons on YouTube.”
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39. Ibid.
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42. “U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index,”U.S. Copyright Office, accessed April 21, 2019, https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Jerry D Campbell,“Intellectual Property in a Networked World: Balancing Fair Use and Commercial Interests,” Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory 19, no. 2 (1995): 179-84, https://doi:10.1016/0364-6408(95)00020-A; Igor Slabykh,“Ambiguous Commercial Nature of Use in Fair Use Analysis,” AIPLA Quarterly Journal 46, no. 3 (2018): 293-339.
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47. “Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services,” Bitlaw, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/pup.html#IIIA.
48. Justia, “Great Minds v. FedEx Office & Print Services, Inc,”Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center, March 21, 2018, https://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/great-minds-v-fedex-office-print-services-inc/.
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51. “The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses.”
52. Ibid.
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56. “Creative Commons—Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International—CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.”
57. The famous Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music case established that a commercial parodycould qualify as fair use.
58. Katz, “Pitfalls of Open Licensing,”411.
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70. Ibid.
Originally published as “Attribution Confusion” with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.