New rules always create confusion but that is not a strong argument against them. The legal complexities of CC reflect the complexity of copyright. That the CC licenses are being used suggests that they are useful. The question is how? Claiming they are not useful is unlikely to be correct. Perhaps the usefulness is social not individual, so people are using them to do good. I take no position on this.

Why, when we are so worried about preserving freedoms, do we prohibit choice on the part of downstream users as to how they can license derivatives works they make? Why don’t we want to protect that user’s freedom to choose how to license his derivative work, into which he put substantial effort? The copyleft approach of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons makes creators of derivative works second-class citizens. And these are the people we claim to be primarily interested in empowering. I can’t stress this point enough: the ShareAlike clause of the CC licenses and the CopyLeft tack of the GFDL rob derivers of the basic freedom to choose which license they will apply to their derived work. ShareAlike and CopyLeft privilege creators while directing derivers to the back of the bus.

Today, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the Comparative and International Education Society’s Annual Conference with representatives of two open education projects that depend on Creative Commons licenses to do their work. One is the OER publisher Siyavula, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Among other things, they publish textbooks for use in primary and secondary school in math and science. After high school students in the country protested about the conditions of their education – singling out textbook prices as a barrier to their learning – the South African government relied on the Creative Commons license used by Siyavula to print and distribute 10 million Siyavula textbooks to school children, some of whom had never had their own textbook before. The other are the related teacher education projects, TESSA, and TESS-India, which use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license on teacher training materials. Created first in English, the projects and their teachers rely on the reuse rights granted by the Creative Commons license to translate and localize these training materials to make them authentic for teachers in the linguistically and culturally diverse settings of sub-Saharan Africa and India. (Both projects are linked to and supported by the Open University in the UK, http://www.open.ac.uk/, which uses Creative Commons-licensed materials as well.) If one wakes up hoping to feel that one’s work in the world is useful, then an experience like this makes it a good day.

Thousands of works published in the United States before 1964 fell into the public domain because the copyright was not renewed in time under the law in effect then. If a work was first published before 1964, the owner had to file a renewal with the Copyright Office during the 28th year after publication. No renewal meant a loss of copyright. If you plan on using a work that was published after 1922, but before 1964, you should research the records of the Copyright Office to determine if a renewal was filed. Chapter 13 describes methods of researching copyright status.

User rights Every CC licence allows you to: Copy the work (eg. download, upload, photocopy and scan the work); Distribute the work (eg. provide copies of the work to teachers, students, parents and the community); Display or perform the work (eg. play a sound recording or film in class, or stage a play to parents); Communicate the work (eg. make the work available online on the school intranet, learning management system or on a class blog); and Format shift verbatim copies of the work (eg copy a MP3 version of music onto a CD or an MP4 version of a film onto a DVD to play in class). Source: Adapted from 'Baseline Rights'  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Baseline_Rights   Some CC licences also let you make other uses, however these are the base user rights provided for all CC material. User obligations When you use any CC material, you must: always attribute the creator of the work (for information on how to attribute a work, see information guide, ‘How to Attribute Creative Commons Material’); get permission from the creator to do anything that goes beyond the terms of the licence (e.g. making a commercial use of the work or creating a derivative work where the licence does not permit this); keep any copyright notice attached to the work intact on all copies of the work; indicate and link to the licence from any copies of the work; and where you make changes to the work, acknowledge the original work and indicate that changes have been made (eg by stating ‘This is a French translation of the original work, X’).   In addition, when you use any CC material, you must not:  alter the terms of the licence; use the work in any way that is prejudicial to the reputation of the creator of the work; imply that the creator is endorsing or sponsoring you or your work; or add any technologies (such as digital rights management) to the work that restrict other people from using it under the terms of the licence. Source:  Adapted from 'Baseline Rights'  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Baseline_Rights 

That said, for a thoughtful survey of how the commons, cultural and otherwise, might thrive inside of, or along with, with current conditions I recommend Peter Barnes’s book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. One of Barnes’s points is that our debates about the future often imagine only two actors: the government and private business. Barnes suggests a third set, common property trusts (as, for example, the kind of land trusts devised by the Nature Conservancy). There is much to say about common property trusts but for now the point is simply that we already have a mix of cultural modes and should continue to have them going forward with, I hope, the commons recognized and strengthened.