A goal of the Community Story Tree project was to identify and address permission and copyright challenges that exist when archiving multimedia content. The media created through this project was used as a vehicle to explore potential barriers and discover new options and best practices for distribution, permissions, copyright, etc., in partnership with the Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL).

The content created through the Community Story Tree Project is intended to be shared widely. The final versions of each digital story have been added to the Open Source Movies collection of the Internet Archive (IA), a California-based Internet library, and are available for download. These stories are available in multiple video formats for others to use in their own projects in compliance with the Creative Commons (CC) license under which they have been released. Additionally, The IA’s online media player is used to include the stories in the Community Story Tree project’s website, adding to the stories distribution reach.

When it comes to local archiving, issues of copyright are, of course, also close to the heart of the GRPL Local History department. Item five of GRPL’s Instrument of Gift for Archival Materials reads “The Library becomes the sole owner of the literary rights to the material.” According to Tim Gleisner, head of the Local History department at GRPL, the library requests sole copyright of materials in their archive partly to maximize efficiency. The library, as the copyright holder, has the legal authority to grant or deny permission for reuse of materials in their archive. More importantly, they do not have to spend the time facilitating permission requests between the third party and the original copyright holder.

Because both GRPL and CMC both to seek to simplify access to content, arriving at an agreement for including materials associated with the Community Story Tree project in GRPL’s permanent archive was not difficult once the appropriate tools and frameworks were identified.

Creative Commons

The Community Media Center (CMC), which began thirty years ago as a public access cable channel, has long advocated for the rights of citizens to create and publish media. Naturally, our work has led us to explore various models for licensing creative content. Creative Commons has emerged as one of the most flexible methods of copyrighting content.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization established in 2001 with the mission of extending traditional copyright to make it easier for people to share content and to build upon previously existing work. CC provides a framework of six content licenses that the content creator can use to customize the level of rights they want other people to have when using their work. These six licenses are comprised of combinations of four basic elements:

• Attribution (BY): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give credit the way you request.
• Share Alike: (SA) You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
• Non-Commercial (NC): You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for non-commercial purposes only.
• No Derivative Works (ND): you let others copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. (Creative Commons, 2010)

These four elements can be mixed and matched to create custom licenses that best reflect the intentions of the content creator, and provide a more nuanced alternative to the “all-rights reserved” and “no-rights reserved” (public domain) binary of traditional copyright licensure (Kapitzke 2009). CC provides the toolset for helping content producers consider how they would like others to use their work. It also provides an easy-to-understand framework for users looking to use and “remix” pieces.

Since their introduction in 2001, variations of CC have become a popular method of ensuring legal reuse of intellectual property on the Internet. CC staffer Jon Phillips estimated in 2008 that there were approximately “200 – 300 million pieces of CC licensed content on the web” (Philips 2008). Though a 2007 web-based survey indicates that individual Internet users tend to be the primary holders of CC licenses, many educational institutions have implemented variations of CC for copyrighting their own material (Kim, 2007).

The University of Michigan library, for example, has used released all of its own content under the CC license Attribution, Non Commercial (CC BY-NC) since October of 2008 (Parkins, 2009). Molly Kleinman, copyright specialist at the U of M library, cites two main reasons for adopting the license: one philosophical, one practical. First, Kleinmann states that CC licensure is “aligned well with our overall commitment to openness and access. Part of the Library’s mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge… Adopting a Creative Commons for our own content seemed like the logical next step.” (Parkins, 2009) “There was also a more practical consideration,” She continued, “We receive permission requests to use Library-produced content with some regularity, and those requests often go to people who have no idea what to do with them. They got bounced around until someone finally just says yes, and these requests can take a lot of time to handle. Creative Commons licenses were made to help reduce transaction costs, and we saw that as a potential benefit for the Library” (Parkins, 2009).

The Community Media Center has similar concerns regarding openness and efficiency. Along with a robust community theater and online platform for citizen journalism, the CMC operates both a public access television channel and community radio station – each running 24 hours per day with content that is primarily produced or curated by Grand Rapids community members. The copyright for the vast majority of items broadcast on the CMC’s various mediums remains with the content creator. Works produced by the CMC, however are released with CC-License Attribution, Non-commercial, No derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND). We have chosen this license in an attempt to balance accessibility and attribution. It allows us to make our work available for people to use without requiring them to ask permission.

In addition to these online resources, all physical materials associated with the Community Story Tree have been added to the archive of the Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL) for posterity and a DVD copy of the final stories has been made available for checkout.

GRPL has agreed to hold the contents of the Community Story Tree collection in their archive under the CMC’s CC BY-NC-ND license, with the understanding that they would not have to contact the CMC to request permission for third party use. Furthermore, the material will not be available for commercial use.

The Community Media Center is dedicated to helping the citizens of Grand Rapids tell their stories, and to ensuring that their stories are available to future generations of scholars. Our partnership with the Local History department of the Grand Rapids Public Library helps ensure that this material will be available for creative reuse in perpetuity.

Work Cited

Creative Commons (2010). About Licenses, Retreived March 10, 2010 from http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

Parkins C. (2009). CC Talks With University of Michigan, Retrieved March 10, 2010 from http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/12859

Phillips, J. (2008). Creative Commons CC+ Overview. Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.scribd.com/doc/2364888/Creative-Commons-CC-Overview .

Kapitzke, C. (2009) Rethinking Copyrights for the Library through Creative Commons Licensing. Library Trends. Volume 58, No. 1, Summer 2009. Retrieved March 10, 2010 from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/v058/58.1.kapitzke.html#b29

Kim, M. (2007). The Creative Commons and copyright protection in the digital era: Uses of Creative Commons licenses. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/kim.html