Is It Time for CC-Bye-Bye?

CC adds complexity, confuses authors, and carries water for Big Tech — plus, secrets at PMC

Creative Commons is a contract layer slapped on top of copyright. It was developed by Big Tech companies and their allies, mainly the techno-utopian Larry Lessig, who famously said “code is law” in what you have to admit is not “democratizing” language. Who votes on the code governing our lives?

Creative Commons was designed and pushed in order to disrupt the copyright-based knowledge economy in favor of Big Tech. Free gas for Model Ts would have been great for Ford, and free information for Google certainly made their profits swell.

But a new survey from AAAS shows that Creative Commons in general and CC BY in particular has only added confusion to the landscape while delivering little to no benefit to authors. Even STM International is starting to hang crepe about CC licenses, which add nothing to scientific communications within scientific communities because of prohibitions on plagiarism and duplicate publication. Lessig and team’s purpose was extramural — to help Big Tech get and stay big.

Here are some top line numbers from the survey:

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