Creative Commons (CC) has enabled a new approach to copyright licensing. CC licenses facilitate novel social, educational, technological, and business practices, and support productive relationships around networked knowledge and culture.
We are dedicated stewards of our licenses and tools, and we educate users, institutions, and policymakers about the positive benefits of adopting CC licenses. Our licenses will always provide voluntary options for creators who wish to share their material on more open terms than current copyright systems allow. But the CC vision — universal access to research and education and full participation in culture — will not be realized through licensing alone.
Around the world, numerous national governments are reviewing or revising their copyright law. Some proposed revisions would broaden the scope of uses of copyrighted works permitted without the rightsholder’s permission. In response, it has been suggested that the very success of CC licenses means that copyright reform is unnecessary — that the licenses solve any problems for users that might otherwise exist. This is certainly not the case. CC licenses are a patch, not a fix, for the problems of the copyright system. They apply only to works whose creators make a conscious decision to affirmatively license the right for the public to exercise exclusive rights that the law automatically grants to them. The success of open licensing demonstrates the benefits that sharing and remixing can bring to individuals and society as a whole. However, CC operates within the frame of copyright law, and as a practical matter, only a small fraction of copyrighted works will ever be covered by our licenses.
我们的经验加强了我们的信念，即在这个数字时代，为了确保文化和经济的最大利益，版权法的范围和形式需要重新审视。无论公共许可模式如何精心设计，它永远无法完全实现改变法律的效果，这意味着法律改革仍然是一个紧迫的话题。公众将享有更广泛的权利，利用人类文化和知识的整体为公众服务。CC许可并不是用户权利的替代品，CC支持正在进行的版权法改革，以加强用户权利和扩大公共领域。
See related blog post:Supporting Copyright Reform
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