When many see copyright as a device to protect intellectual property, there are others who seek alternatives of copyright that liberates knowledge without even damaging a creator’s rice bowl. Creative Commons licenses lead a path towards the latter, and it is reshaping in India.
To a non-lawyer like myself, a creative work of any kind — poetry, a fiction, a documentary that I made, or even a photograph — look precious and worth protecting from anyone to steal and misuse. But in reality, what goes on the Internet, stays on the Internet — in hundreds of places as mirror copies. Copyright laws are so complex and it is so difficult for a common creative producer to protect their work from being misused, the basic purpose of sharing knowledge is often lost in the pursuit of protection.
Copyright formally came to India through the British empire and got formalized in The Copyright Act 1957which is simplified in a handbook. In simple terms, any creative work — like literary, dramatic,musical and artistic works — that involves a noteworthy creative process is by default copyrighted by the original author. The work, however, is owned by the employer when an employee creates something as part of their job or contract. Copyright is transferred when the author (author is a broad term used for the creator of the work) explicitly transfers the rights. So, when someone writes a poetry or a story or a blog, or clicks a picture, or paints a painting, they own the copyright of the work as long as the work is not merely an adaptation or translation.
A work when published is generally copyrighted by default and it is prohibited from sharing. So, a blog or a social media post or a picture posted anywhere can be considered as a copyrighted content and one would need the copyright holder’s permission to use it. The good news is use of some of the copyrighted content for personal, academic and some noncommercial purposes are allowedwhich can be clubbed under the fair dealing. However, these are not enough. Lifting an image from Google search and using it in a commercial site is illegal. Public funded works that are published in public portal such as the government websites are mostly copyrighted. Looking at the Wikipedia articles about many things Indian can give a sense that there are way too less images in articles related to India as Wikipedia does not allow use of anything that is copyrighted. Copyright in itself is a major hindrance in knowledge sharing.
Many who faced such issues started to think what could be a better alternative back in 2001, and Creative Commons was born as a better alternative to the traditional copyright laws across world nations. There are a group of licenses which are mostly popular as CC licenses and allow people to reuse, remix and adapt original works while the original author is generally attributed.
CC licenses are quite flexible — the CC-BY-ND-NCis as protective as copyright except a little bit of openness in it whereas CC0 license is close to Public Domain and is very open — and provides a range of protections to authors depending on what they need. Just like not every single picture of a photographer is saleable, not every work of every author needs the strictest copyright restriction (i.e. All Rights Reserved).
Though several organizations, portals and individuals from India have been releasingtheir works online under CC licenses, a breakthrough happened because of the effort of CC-India in 2013 when the Indian government releasedthe National Repository of Open Educational Resources(NROER) project by releasing text, images, audio, video and other interactive media under a CC-BY-SA 3.0license — a license allowing users to use, remix and redistribute content from NCERT. In fact, there is also India-specific CC-BY license that is available for Indian users.
Recently there was a decision to bring a new structure across all the CC communities worldwide through the Creative Commons Global Network(CCGN) to make them more active locally. Individual and organizations who are already active in promoting the CC licenses can jointo become CCGN members and reform the chapter in their country. For India, there are only a handful of individuals who are part of the CCGN which needs a more diverse contribution. Additionally many of the volunteers are gathering in Bangalore and Delhi on September 1, and online to discuss about the future of Creative Commons in India. These events are open to all upon registration. A country like India where majority of the government content are copyrighted need open licensing more than any other country. There are exceptions to this as some of the Odisha government portals and social media accounts which were relicensed to CC licenses because of the effort of Odia Wikimedians User Group, Centre for Internet and Society, and Wikimedia Foundation. But more work like the latter are yet to be done across state governments and the center. Joining CC-India Chapter can be a starting point.
Subhashish Panigrahi is a Bangalore-based community manager, language archivist, and documentary filmmaker with a decade long work across many open knowledge/Internet initiatives including organizations like Internet Society, National Geographic, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, and the Centre for Internet and Society. Follow him on Twitter at @subhapa
This article was authored by Subhashish Panigrahi and was published on the Wire (titled "As Creative Commons Restructures Globally, What Should its Future in India Look Like?"). The version uploaded here does not contain any edits by the Wire staff and is solely owned by the author, and is released under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.