Highway Africa News Agency (Grahamstown)
David Kezio-Musoke
26 May 2005
Johannesburg — After yesterday's long, serious presentations and debates on the value of Creative Commons (cc) you might still not know that the Creative Commons license (ccL) you are currently using is built on three flexible layers.
And you might even find it slightly strange to discover that you still do not need to know about the workings of all three layers when licensing your works under Creative Commons. At some stage, however, you will certainly benefit from legal advice and a special machine-readable tag specifying the exact terms of your licence.
Andrew Rens the Legal Lead at Creative Commons South Africa (ccSA) explained to Open Commons that the first layer of the licence is referred to as the Creative Commons deed. It is the basic 'legal act' that any user of the ccL might want to become familiar with.
"You don't worry about legalities with this," he says. "It is written in the simplest language with all the forms of different Creative Commons licenses. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand it and it legally binds you with confidence."
Rens, at the forefront of developing ccSA within South Africa's legal framework, refers to the other two layers of the licence as the 'legal code' and the 'machine code'
The legal code, designed by lawyers for lawyers, has two main elements - the universal aspect and the country specific aspect. If you are an artist intent on uploading your works to the internet under a Creative Commons licence your lawyers might be interested in reading this first of the two elements.
"One, the universal, is written for usage in all parts of the world while the other is written to fit the jurisdiction of specified countries," Rens explains. He adds that the legal code is written in a similar language to conventional copyright law and is bound by international treaties.
In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons makes available the 'machine code' to allow, artists, writers and others go online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made license they can append to their works without having to pay a lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase similar legal services.
With the machine code, a special machine-readable tag is embedded in the page to specify the exact licensing terms. For example Creative Commons has a Yahoo Search service that finds content across the Web that has a cc license. While most material you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors who want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions.
"The most important thing about the machine code is that it tells other programs what can be used and what can't be, enabling people who are not techies to use works under Creative Commons", Rens adds.
The relationship between these layers is that they are flexible, written in many different languages including English, Spanish and French.
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