Is Creative Commons a Panacea for Managing Digital IPs? (Introduction)

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.

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39. Ibid.

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43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

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52. Ibid.

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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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63. Katz, “Pitfalls of Open Licensing,”391; Susan Corbett, “Creative Commons Licences,the Copyright Regime and the Online Community: Is There a Fatal Disconnect?,” The Modern Law Review 74, no. 4 (2011):506, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20869091.

64. Lawrence Lessig,“Against Transparency,” New Republic, October 8, 2009, https://newrepublic.com/article/70097/against-transparency.

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70. Ibid.

Originally published as “Attribution Confusion” with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.