- A. The development of CC as an international standard
- B. Open paradigm
- C. Software
- D. Key statements
- E. History of the CCPL
- F. CC as an organisation, global network, chapter
A. The development of CC as an international standard
16 Like all "free licences", Creative Commons licences developed out of the need to enable more extensive use of content than is permitted under copyright law.
17 Modern copyright law assumes that the creator of a work should have a temporary right to decide solely on the reproduction, distribution and public use of that work. The Creative Commons licence is a type of licence that allows the creator of a work to grant certain rights to others. This monopoly right based on "copy control" has become the foundation of the creative industries. The possibility of selling rights of use by granting licences turns the work, as an expression of human creativity, into a tradable economic asset.
18 In recent years, the scope of application of copyright law has been significantly expanded: for example, the terms of protection have been continuously extended – in Europe to 70 years after the death of the author. On the other hand, the requirements for the level of creativity, i.e. the degree of originality that a personal intellectual creation must fulfil in order to be protected as a work at all. Finally, numerous ancillary copyrights mean that comparable protection also applies in certain cases where no works are created at all because the necessary degree of creative activity is lacking. Examples of this are the rights of sound recording producers, press publishers, film producers and database producers.
19 Digitalisation has made copyright even more important and the central legal basis of the information society. In the digital space, every use technically becomes a copy, at least in the working memory of a computer. And everything that is a copy is relevant to copyright.
20 Copyrights are exclusive rights granted for a limited period of time: They allow their owners to decide on their own use and to exclude others from using them. This principle is an assessment by the legislator that has laid the foundation for the economic exploitation of creativity. At the same time, copyright law contains a number of provisions designed to balance this monopoly right with other interests: statutory permissions, also known as limitations, because they restrict the absolute monopoly right of copyright. Furthermore, these exclusive rights are only valid for a limited period of time.
B. Open paradigm
21 The basic rule of copyright law that content may only be used with the express permission of the author or rights holder is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce in the digital age, but is also being fundamentally questioned or superseded by other regulations. Digital content is easier to distribute and use than ever before. This has given rise to an important movement that is guided by the paradigm This has given rise to an important movement based on the paradigm of free access and free use. This principle has gained particular importance in the fields of software, science, education and culture. In order to achieve the goals of the open paradigm, copyright law is being used to expand the possibilities for use by means of licences.
C. Software
22 Very early on, in the field of software, which was also subject to intellectual property law and thus to the basic idea that distribution and modification were only permitted with the consent of the rights holder, the idea developed of using appropriate licences to ensure that the source code of software was available to everyone and could be modified at will . This was because software developers did not want to start from scratch every time they wrote software, but rather build on what others had already developed. To safeguard this principle, the "GNU General Public Licence" (GNU GPL) was developed in 1989, the first free software licence, which allowed users to use, study, share and modify the software. "Open source", i.e. "open, free source code", established itself as a principle in the software market in the following years, driven in particular by the Linuxoperating system . Today, entire markets are based on the development, maintenance, customisation and marketing of open source software. Globally speaking, it is more widespread than proprietary software, which must be licensed individually for use. This is because open source software clearly dominates the server sector and professional software in general, such as control software. In the field of mobile devices, too, Android, an open source-based operating system, has become established.
I. Science
23 Science recognised early on the opportunities offered by the internet and the advantages of a free exchange of knowledge. This is also related to the fact that openness and falsifiability of findings are among the fundamental principles of science and are much older than copyright law. Scientific publications should therefore be freely reusable and outside the scope of copyright law. However, this could only be reliably ensured by a comprehensive exemption from copyright law, as provided for official works in Section 5 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG). Such an exemption would permanently ensure that scientific publications are not subject to the restrictions of copyright exploitation logic and thus remain freely accessible and reusable, and that the dependence of science on copyright exploitation interests is eliminated. This requires action on the part of the legislator. However, national solo efforts are prevented by European regulations and international treaties, meaning that a Europe-wide or even globally coordinated reform would be necessary.
24 As long as copyright and exclusive rights apply as standard to science and scientific findings, scientists must actively free them from this restrictive logic through free licences. Only through free licensing can the basic principles of science, openness, verifiability and reusability, be fully realised . As a result, maintaining the status quo by failing to freely license scientific contributions could therefore be interpreted as a violation of the (albeit legally unenforceable) rules of "Good Scientific Practice" (GWP). Scientists should also feel ethically obliged to grant the general public (and thus also other scientists as a subset thereof) comprehensive opportunities for use, since scientific findings and publications, in contrast to commercial products created by freelance authors to earn their living, are usually produced within the framework of a temporary or permanent, possibly even civil service position, and are thus financed by the general public.
25 The right to free availability of scientific findings and publications and the possibilities of fulfilling this right through CC licensing are widely recognised in the scientific community. Even if the scientific nature of published contributions cannot be denied per se when applying copyright exploitation logic, the dependence of science on profit-oriented publishers is in any case self-inflicted. Only a self-confident and responsible decision by each individual scientist can help to free science from this dependence; the present publication is intended to contribute to enabling them to do so comprehensively .
26 Beyond the field of law, the relationship between copyright and academic freedom is rarely discussed in principle, but rather limited to calling for free access and free use as a desirable ideal for science.
27 As early as 2002 , the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) stated :
"Open access means that [...] literature should be freely and publicly available on the Internet so that interested parties can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, reference and otherwise use the full texts in any conceivable legal manner without financial, legal or technical barriers beyond those associated with Internet access itself. In all matters of reprinting and distribution, and in all matters of copyright in general, the only restriction should be to allow the respective authors control over their work and to secure their right to have their work appropriately acknowledged and cited."
28 In the Berlin Declaration
II. Education
29 In education, the open paradigm is discussed under the term "Open Educational Resources" (OER). OER comprises freely licensed teaching materials that can be used, modified and adapted to specific educational contexts without restriction.
30 The concept of OER is promoted in particular by UNESCO, which also sees it as an opportunity to enable education worldwide and thus promote development and prosperity.
31 In the Cape Town Declaration in 2008, teachers and learners were called upon for the first time to make use of freely licensed content. This concern was reiterated in 2012 at the first UNESCO World Congress on OER in the Paris Declaration
32 In Germany, OER have been and continue to be promoted through numerous projects at state and federal level. Since 2016, OERinfo has been a publicly funded, topic-specific online portal that provides information on this subject to both specialist target groups and the general public .
III. Culture
33 The open paradigm is also becoming increasingly important in culture. This seems surprising, as copyright law traditionally focuses on controlling and restricting usage options in order to secure the exploitation of creative works. When considering the significance of the open paradigm, a distinction must be made between cultural creation and exploitation on the one hand and cultural preservation on the other. The former refers to the creation of art and culture, the latter to the collection and preservation of cultural products so that they remain in the public consciousness .
34
In professional cultural production and the associated economic exploitation, the concept of remuneration claims for each use dominates. Accordingly, free licences are rarely used in this area. This occurs in isolated cases in constellations that do not correspond to the usual exploitation logic. One example of this would be the – albeit hesitant and restrictive – use of Creative Commons licences in public service broadcasting (a well-known example of this are Terra-XPlain videos
35 The preservation of culture, on the other hand, is usually at odds with the principles of copyright law, which is designed for exploitation. For this reason , copyright law also contains a number of special provisions for museums, archives and libraries that resolve this conflict in certain cases , in particular Sections 60e - 61g of the German Copyright Act (UrhG). However, the fundamental conflict remains. While the exploitation of cultural works is based on access control and restriction, the preservation of culture pursues the goal of protecting cultural products from oblivion and promoting their use. In this respect, the objectives of publicly funded institutions for the preservation of culture, such as museums, archives and libraries, are already close to the open paradigm. In many cases, their work only begins where the commercial exploitation of creative works is no longer profitable.
36 Given the different objectives – economic exploitation in the cultural industry on the one hand and the widest possible social impact and attention in public cultural institutions on the other – a very different attitude towards the open paradigm can also be explained. In the cultural industry, the paradigm only plays a role where new business models do not rely on control, scarcity or fee-based use. Cultural heritage institutions, on the other hand, often feel committed to the open paradigm and therefore also use Creative Commons licences wherever possible.
D. Key statements
I. CCPL
37 CC licences are standard licence agreements that, under different conditions, enable comprehensive use of copyright-protected materials in six variants. The licence (more precisely: the licence offer) for CC-licensed materials is aimed at a global audience. CC licences strike a balance between the initial case of copyright exclusivity and unconditional release of materials, which creates or approximates public domain status.
38 As copyright licences, CC licences permit the copyright-relevant use of such content only insofar as it is covered by copyright protection. At the same time, they do not restrict uses that are already permitted by law.
39 The rights of use under a CC licence are granted free of charge. They permit use in any medium – online or offline, intangible or tangible – as well as for known or unknown (future) types of use. CC licensing therefore permits all uses, from online sharing to printing, distribution or data mining (for details on the licensed rights, see section 2.a). All six licence variants regulate unlimited rights of use in terms of time and space – i.e. until the expiry of the copyright or ancillary copyright and worldwide.
40 There are four licence modules: BY, NC, ND and SA. The modules differentiate according to
the commercial use that is permitted or reserved, in the latter case using the NC licence module – Non Commercial;
the right to publish and distribute the licensee's own adaptations of the work, which is granted or reserved, in the latter case using the licence module ND – No Derivatives; and
the obligation that licensees must also freely licence any adaptations they have made when distributing them, provided that the SA – Share Alike licence module is used. 41
41 Common to all CC licence variants is the obligation to attributethe licensor and indicate the licence when distributing the material (BY-Attribution). The modules can be combined to produce six possible licence variants: BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-ND, BY-NC-ND and BY-NC-SA. The ND and SA licence modules cannot be combined, because SA regulates the mandatory release of edited works when they are distributed, while ND specifically excludes the publication of edits.
42 CC licences are intended to enable licensed materials to be used easily, without legal expertise and without the need for individual negotiation. At the same time, CC licensing should be based on a licence agreement that is legally sound and precise and that formulates the terms of use transparently. Legal soundness, simplicity and recognisability for technical systems are implemented in the licence design of CC licences with their three-layermodel :
Legal code: This is the licence agreement (the Creative Commons Public Licence, or CCPL for short), which is the subject of this commentary. The licence text must be referenced in an appropriate manner when the material is distributed (see section 3).
Commons Deed: The generally understandable version of the The commonly understood version of the CC licence is implemented using pictograms (icons) and the short terms of the licence and their abbreviations (BY, NC, ND, SA). The most important conditions of the licence, i.e. its appeals (e.g. "no commercial use" with a crossed-out dollar sign), are to be expressed to the public using simple symbolic language.
Machine-readable version (digital code): CC licences were designed for online use from the outset. Therefore, the option of making CC licensing machine-readable was created. Search engines and other technologies can thus "understand" that, for example, an image is CC-licensed or a scientific paper is published under a CC licence and thus under open access conditions. For this purpose, the licence can be attached in machine-readable form with an HTML code that the licence chooser outputs when selecting the licence.
II. CC0
43 With the help of the CC0 release declaration (pronounced "CC zero"), copyright-protected materials can be released without any conditions. Use is then possible without mandatory attribution or licence notices. CC0 contains both a waiver of existing property rights to the material and an unconditional licence ("fallback licence"). The latter applies if copyright cannot be completely waived, especially in Germany. CC0 is also commented on extensively in this book.
III. Public Domain Mark (PDM)
44 The Public Domain Mark (PDM) is not a licence, but merely a label and part of the CC toolkit . The PDM can facilitate the use of public domain works by making it easier to recognise content labelled with it as being in the public domain and confirming its status as public domain, at least in a non-binding manner. This is because, even though no permission is required to use public domain content, its use often fails because the public domain status of works is unknown or unclear. Even though no permission is required to use public domain content, its use often fails because the public domain status of works is unknown or unclear. With its easy comprehensibility thanks to the PDM pictogram and the machine readability of the label, the PDM also uses the proven layers of CC licences without the need for a contractual text. At the same time, the "guarantee" provided by the labeller is not sufficient to establish genuine liability.
E. History of the CCPL
I. Legislation as the initial spark
45 The history of Creative Commons as a concept and organisation began around 2001 with a constitutional dispute in the United States. In 1998, the US Congress passed the fifth law extending the term of copyright, the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, also known by the name of the congressman who introduced it as the Sonny Bono Act. The Act extended current terms of protection by twenty years, bringing the term of protection for most works under US law to seventy years after the death of the last surviving creative contributor. For unpublished works by companies, the term of protection was extended to 120 years from the creation of the work, and for published works to 95 years from publication. The Disney Corporation, which lobbied for the extension of the terms of protection, benefited particularly from the law. Without the changes, the first works featuring Mickey Mouse, published in 1928, would have entered the public domain in 1999. Critics therefore mockingly called the law the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
46 Before the law was passed, various players in the emerging Internet sector had been preparing to make public domain works available online – a project that, at the time, involved high investment costs compared to today . When the CTEA postponed this possibility by two full decades into the future, one of them, Eric Eldred, filed a constitutional complaint against the law on behalf of all those who had been waiting for the works to become freely available.
II. Version 1.0 – Attribution still optional
47 A flexible legal tool was needed to give those who wanted something different for their own works than the standard copyright total prohibition of "All rights reserved" the power to act in the face of increasingly stringent enforcement mechanisms and ever-longer absolute property rights . In explicit reference to the approaches of free Explicitly following the approach of free software, which since the 1980s has used standardised licences ("public licences") aimed at the general public to leverage the very strong intellectual property rights of copyright and related rights have been leveraged to achieve the exact opposite of prohibitions and scarcity – namely, comprehensive permissions for use, modification and distribution (see also the "copyleft" principle) – Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, Ben Adida and Lawrence Lessig jointly developed a series of standard licence agreements. These were already modular in their first version, i.e. they consisted of differently combined, otherwise largely identical clauses, and were designed to be understandable in terms of scope and language to legal laymen and usable for their own purposes.
48 The first set of licences in version 1.0 was officially presented on 16 December 2002. It contained the four central modules BY, NC, ND and SA (see above, para. 25) that are still in use today which even then, in combination, resulted in the six different licence variants found in all subsequent versions, but at that time also included five additional variants, each of which lacked the attribution condition module. [9]
49 The German legislature had already taken into account the concept of a simple, royalty-free right of use for "everyone", as was already widespread in the field of open source software, with the introduction of the so-called Linux clause in Section 32 (3) sentence 3 UrhG in March 2002.
III. Version 2.0 – Clarifications, disclaimer and porting approach
50 As there was a growing community of users of this participation-based licensing concept, numerous comments and suggestions for improvement in practical use were received, and this was soon followed by the revision and reformulation of the licences, the versioning of which had been planned from the outset .
51 After intensive discussions and some integration work, version 2.0 was presented on 25 May 2004. It no longer included the licence variants without attribution requirements (BY), as these had previously only been selected in the low single-digit percentage range. The licence texts were clarified to the effect that attribution could now be made more easily via links, and specific regulations for synchronisation and music rights were introduced in the various licence variants. The third major innovation was an explicit disclaimer on the part of the licensors. 52 Shortly after the launch of version 1.0, the subsidiary project iCommons was created, a platform designed to enable international networking around open content and thus take account of the fact that open content was not only used in Germany but also internationally. 53 Shortly after the launch of version 1.0, the subsidiary project iCommons was created, a platform designed to enable international networking around open content and thus take account of the fact that open content was not only used in Germany but also internationally.
52 Shortly after the introduction of version 1.0, the subsidiary project iCommons was created, a platform that enables international networking around open content and thus takes into account the fact that the internet, the medium on which the CC approach was based and to which it referred, itself bridges national borders. At the same time, there was (and still is) an important difference to the world of free software, from which the CC approach drew its inspiration: the CC approach took and continues to take into account all types of works, including traditional ones, for which there was a landscape of different copyright traditions worldwide. convergence, not only in the form of the Berne Convention and the IP chapters of international trade agreements, etc., but also – driven by digitalisation – in the form of converging social norms and spreading online business practices.
53 Nevertheless, the founding generation of the CC approach considered it opportune not to simply leave it at a uniform tool written in English and shaped by the US copyright legal situation. Rather, a kind of global "harmonisation from below" should be attempted:
54 For the globally diverse copyright systems, functionally adapted versions of the CC licences were to be drafted, the so-called ports, which should be compatible with each other and, according to the respective national legal system, lead to a set of permissionsfor users that is as identicalas possible to all other national ones . Where the original licence texts based on US law would be partially ineffective – for example in Japan – due to local legal or other traditional legal peculiarities, and would therefore result in a lower level of permission in case of doubt, a port adapted to Japanese intellectual property law should take up the local peculiarities in such a way that, in the end, the identical set of permissions would be created. This global porting endeavour was launched with version 2.0, and it was not only unique in the open content world (where the actual contract texts of GPL, GFDL and other standard licences are otherwise translated into other languages for informational purposes only, but not adapted in terms of content), it also gave rise to a global network of lawyers involved in the porting process, which continues to exist today.
55 Version 2.5 differs from the previous versions only in that it includes the option of attributing the licensed material to a person, group, organisation or other entity within the scope of the attribution requirement (for more on this, see the commentary section under section 3, margin note 27 ff.).
IV. Version 3.0 – Greater international openness, standard tool for Wikipedia
56 The path already taken with version 2.0 towards a globally functioning legal tool coincided at the beginning of 2005, less than three years after version 1.0, with other circumstances : with the increased adoption of the CCPL by high-reach platforms such as Flickr and the desire of many to also provide a solution for the increasingly important Wikipedia to the provisional licence used there. The GNU Free Documentation License is heavily geared towards software documentation and text as licence material, and was considered from the outset of the Wikipedia project to be a stopgap solution that would not be ideal for other materials found in the encyclopaedia, such as images in particular. 57
57 At the same time, it was widely believed that versions 2.0 and 2.5 did not yet represent the final word on the matter, even at Creative Commons itself, which is why proposals for further versioning were discussed very openly. The start of the public discussion of a version 3.0 was announced in August 2006.
58 As far as the licences themselves are concerned, the approach of "porting" them to as many legal systems as possible was pursued even more consistently in version 3.0. To express this, the English-language versions were renamed from "Generic" to "Unported". In terms of content, the structure of the previous versions was largely retained, but several textual additions were made. These ranged from minor adjustments such as the change from the term "derivatives" to " adaptations" (the definition of which now also explicitly addressed the aspect that the pre-existing material must still be recognisable in the derivative work in order to be considered an adaptation) to extensively expanded definitions of the core copyright terms "distribution" and "public communication". The latter additions in particular brought the CCPL closer to the wording of conventional copyright contracts with their long lists. Likewise, only version 3.0 contains an obligation to describe any changes made to the source material.
59 However, the most far-reaching changes in version 3.0 concern three aspects: Firstly, the explicit inclusion of ancillary copyright holders, and in particular performing artists, in the definition of "Original Author" and, correspondingly, their protected objects in the potential licence objects of the CCPL (definition of "Work"); secondly, a detailed regulation of the relationship to compulsory licences, statutory remuneration claims and other collective rights management arrangements rights exploitation; and thirdly – but only in certain ports – a comprehensive waiver of database producer rights. The latter innovation was the result of fierce disputes between those influenced by the US understanding of law and those who came more from European legal traditions. In this respect, these debates were proof that internationalisation was taking hold. However, their outcome, namely the explicit waiver of rights in ports where sui generis database producer protection exists in the legal system, led to a schism that lasted for years. As a result, some of the open data communities and the entire open map data community turned away from the mainstream of open content licensing and began to develop their own licensing models. Resolving this schism was one of the objectives of the subsequent versioning to 4.0. It can therefore be said that when version 3.0 was introduced, the stage was already set for its subsequent replacement.
60 Initially, however, the improved version 3.0 began its triumphant advance as a release tool, also becoming the new preferred licence for Wikipedia and its sister projects. During this period, the CCPL became the de facto standard worldwide – with the exception of the world of free and open source software, which Creative Commons continued to describe itself as a separate cosmos, and newly added with the exception of the world of open data and map data. And with the increasingly relevant international use of the CCPL, the various CC communities now increasingly encountered the interest groups of established exploitation industries, including in the media and politics. Players such as collecting societies now understood that a regulatory model was emerging that was by no means aimed solely at amateur creators. Ultimately, the idea of more self-determined management of one's own rights thus came to the attention of legislators at EU level, which, among other things, led years later to a compromise formula in the Collecting Societies Directive, according to which members of such collective management organisations must have the option of releasing their works for non-commercial use by the general public .
In line with the porting approach, it also became apparent that intergovernmental organisations operate in a legal space that is to a certain extent independent. Creative Commons developed a separate port for them under the name "IGO" (Intergovernmental Organisations), which was not continued in version 4.0, but was included as part of the generic version 4.0 (see section 8.d).
V. Version 4.0 – Coordinated international approach, abandonment of porting
61 Version 3.0 of the CCPL, introduced on 23 February 2007, had set in motion a great deal of momentum, not only in the form of ever-increasing use worldwide, including the Wikipedia switchover. It had also led to friction between the active members of the CC world and other open content movements. Particularly among open data activists, especially in the OpenStreetMap community, there were sometimes fierce reactions to the way in which database producer rights were handled in those CC ports where such rights existed in the legal system, i.e. first and foremost in those for EU member states, including Germany.
62 It was argued that database producer rights in the open data context were often the only secure absolute property right to the content to be released, and that CC licences, by systematically abandoning this very right, would remove the central anchor point for open content releases. They were therefore no longer suitable for licence-based releases in general and copyleft mechanisms in particular. The climax of this dispute was the development of several new licence tools by open data activists with the support of the Open Knowledge Foundation, namely the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL)
63Despite the nominal or formal compatibility of all CC ports with each other, material incompatibilities could still occur, given the 39 ports and the possible combinations in an almost astronomical number of potential constellations. This effect had been foreseen when the decision in favour of the porting approach was made, but at the time it was considered to be more of an academic problem, which is probably the correct assessment, as the material incompatibilities have not led to any known disputes in practice. When such incompatibilities actually arose and were discussed, there were two possible solutions: either to retain the porting principle and establish a mechanism whereby the release of a work under a CC licence would always require parallel licensing under all existing ported versions of this licence, with the porting always being primarily decisive for use in the country where the use takes place, where a related legal dispute is being litigated, or where there is any other point of connection; or abandoning the portingprinciple in favour of a uniform, globally applicable, international version. Both were only feasible through renewed versioning. After intensive discussions, the CC community opted for the latter approach, abandoning porting in favour of an international version. This was supplemented by official, i.e. not merely informational, translations into the various national languages.
64 At the same time, this versioning to 4.0 made it possible to address the aforementioned schism between the CC and open data worlds and the fact that it had become apparent that the text structure and layout of the licences were not as user-friendly as initially hoped. Therefore, the structure of the licences was significantly changed for the first time since version 1.0, simplified and made clearer.
65 Today, no further versions of the CC licences or further licence variants are foreseeable, i.e. no new condition modules or combinations. There have been repeated isolated calls for variants that go beyond the NC condition, which generally applies to all commercial use, and exclude use for certain purposes (e.g. use in the context of weapons manufacturing or for training surveillance and, in particular, facial recognition systems). Since its introduction in 2009, the additional tool CC0 ("CC Zero", see above) has only been available in version 1.0. Here, too, no further version is currently planned.
F. CC as an organisation, global network, chapter
66 As already mentioned, the emergence of Creative Commons as a project is closely linked to a very specific legislative development in the USA, namely the renewed extension of copyright protection periods at the turn of the millennium. Creative Commons can also be understood as a response to the perceived discrepancy between the promise of digitalisation and the internet on the one hand and the legal reality on the other.
67 This discrepancy consisted and continues to consist in the fact that digitalisation initially led to a sharp drop in costs and subsequently to a kind of democratisation of the means of creative production. This enabled a broad mass of people to access creative forms of expression. At the same time, however, this potential was hampered by the legal framework of a rigid copyright system that was created for the business relationship between professional creatives and the exploitation industries that had been established for decades .
68 Copyright systems, as they have been widely established as standard in industrialised nations since the 1970s at the latest, cover everything and everyone without asking, regardless of whether creative professionals actually want absolute protection of their works in the sense of "intellectual property" in all cases. The digital revolution and the internet brought entirely new generations and population groups into the world of copyright. They contributed creative and transformative ideas, even though they had previously played no role in this area because their creative activities and possibilities for use simply did not exist at the time. Their concerns and interests were new at the end of the 1990s. At the turn of the millennium, they then became part of the structures of the At the turn of the millennium, they became entangled in the structures of the highly professionalised camps representing intellectual property rights interests, followed by the "copyright wars" and, in Germany, the disputes over file sharing and mass warnings, liability for interference and, not so long ago, the political battles over upload filters and much more. Creative Commons, on the other hand, was intended at the time of its creation and still intends today to offer alternative paths to those creative individuals who do not want the traditional, very rigid exclusivity protection of copyright either for some of their works or for their entire oeuvre – whether for symbolic, political, altruistic or even utilitarian reasons. The idea of such empowerment is, as is well known, not new; it gained relevance with the free software movement, but should now be extended to all other types of works and communities.
69 The venture was initially financed philanthropically primarily by the Hewlett Foundation and required the organisational establishment of a corporation, Creative Commons Inc., in 2002. In terms of organisation, the ongoing internationalisation led to the creation of further structures such as iCommons and CC International, and, for a time, Science Commons, a spin-off for the world of science. The decentralised level of affiliates was formed via affiliate agreements, some of which were concluded with individuals and some with organisations. Often, there was one agreement per country for legal project management (Legal Project Lead) and another for public relations and similar activities (Public Project Lead). The fact that organisations included "Creative Commons" in their incorporated name was not actually intended, because it was more difficult to regulate than through an agreement. Where this did occur, it was tolerated at best. The country projects were free to decide how to design their websites, and did so. They were also allowed to register the corresponding country domains, to which subdomains such as de.creativecommons.org were redirected.
70 The annual congress, initially established as the iCommons Summit, was renamed the CC Summit in 2011 and serves as an annual meeting and platform for discussing important decisions in person. It continues to take place, while the structure of international cooperation was fundamentally reorganised in 2018 and provided with its own governance. Today, the global CC community is organised into chapters, Today, the global CC community is organised into chapters, mirroring the structures of many other international projects. The main difference from the previous structure of country projects based on individual agreements is that the formation of chapters is more formalised and their structure is more prescriptive, and they have certain basic tasks and formally regulated participation in the entire network, the CC Global Network.
71 None of the CC structures were designed or sufficiently funded to finance global participation in Creative Commons and its further development in the form of full-time work. The only thing that was possible was to operate CC internationally as a coordination office in Berlin and to organise the annual summit, for which there were a few travel grants. Accordingly, the work of the affiliates (and the work of the chapters today) was based on voluntary commitment, even though many of those involved work professionally in the field of intellectual property law, the creative industries or academia, and CC's work has cross-links to these areas. Even in the USA, the number of people who were able to work intensively on CC and its legal issues always remained in the range of a few dozen. This made it all the more sensational when, in Europe around 2007, the European Union agreed to fund a thematic network to deal with digital public domain issues . The "EU Thematic Network" funding instrument enables a consortium of organisations such as universities to finance three workshops and one major conference per year on a specific topic in order to submit policy recommendations on the topic under investigation to the European Commission at the end of the year . The EU Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, which has now been formed, is called Communia and is led by the Polytechnic University of Turin. The consortium of participating organisations consists of Creative Commons, the CC affiliates based in Europe and several others. It developed highly regarded recommendations on the state of digital commons and the corpus of public domain works, not only in Europe, and, through its 12 face-to-face events held throughout Europe, brought about networking and an exchange of ideas that would not otherwise have taken place. At the end of the EU funding period, there was still money available, which the Communia Association
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