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Medium adds Creative Commons licensing for writers

Matthew Lew

Writing platform Medium is following the lead of services like Flickr and Vimeo and introducing Creative Commons copyright options for its authors. As of today, writers will be able to select between a variety of licenses that go beyond the standard "all rights reserved," letting readers republish, translate, or otherwise remix their work. It's partly a concrete attempt to expand the reach of Creative Commons, and partly an attempt to educate people about the range of options between traditional copyright and the public domain.

"Copyright is everywhere. It's on everything, from the minute you put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard," says Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. "That means that we're all copyright holders, whether we want to be or not." But "even simple sharing under permissive terms is not easy," he says. By default, copyright can cover a wide (and sometimes confusing) range of potential uses, some of which creators might not actually want to restrict — like a fan translating a blog post into another language.

There are six Creative Commons licenses, which range from only asking for attribution to barring commercial use and derivative works; users can also choose to release their work from copyright altogether. Existing Medium articles, meanwhile, will default to standard copyright protection. "We explicitly put in a description of what the licenses mean," says Jamie Talbot of Medium. "Part of this is about educating the public that 'all rights reserved' is not the only option, and that there are these specific ways that you can give some freedoms to other people."

"'All rights reserved' is not the only option."

Alongside the launch, designer Matthew Lew is illustrating a popular speech by author and digital liberties advocate Cory Doctorow, who publishes his novels under a Creative Commons license. Lawrence Lessig, copyright reform activist and co-founder of Creative Commons, has also written a short piece in recognition of the change.

Individual authors could say that they're using any of these licenses with or without Medium's help. But creating a built-in option on other services has helped turn them into Creative Commons hubs. Flickr's straightforward licensing options, for example, have made it a source of free, high-quality stock photos. Fiction platform Wattpad includes Creative Commons licensing as an option for its writers. Several other sites, like Wikipedia, have also incorporated the Creative Commons framework. "Ideas are most useful when they're built upon and combined with others, and stories live through being reinterpreted, retold, modified, embellished," says Talbot. "I think the Commons is a little-understood, but very valuable part of our culture, and we want to enable and be a part of that as much as we can."

It's important to note that anyone can use a picture or piece of writing in certain ways without the creator's permission, regardless of whether it's licensed through the Creative Commons framework. Under fair use exceptions, anyone is free to copy pieces of a work to comment on it, parody it, or transform it in a meaningful way — like using a small thumbnail of an image in a search engine. But fair use is a loose collection of factors that are weighed in a legal case, not a cut-and-dried guide to what people can and cannot do. All Creative Commons does is widen the range of possibilities, and remove some of the uncertainty that comes with making a fair use argument.

"Our hope is that people would learn more about copyright, but our biggest hope was that we would also take the barriers that sometimes feel insurmountable about copyright out of the way and give people simple terms," says Merkley. "So they can focus on being creative."

Correction: A quote from Medium's Jamie Talbot was originally attributed to Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley.