by Fabrice Epelbouin , published on 27.07.2009

Now that digital tools are ubiquitous, collage, an artistic pursuit that used to be ranged with macramé and pottery, is now enjoying a widespread vogue with the digital native generation. In this age of Photoshop, iMovie and Web 2.0, Lavoisier’s maxim, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed,” has taken on a worldwide resonance amongst this first global generation, to a point where it accounts for a very large part of the user-generated content (UGC) that the social media are raving about.

There is an obstacle facing this dynamic, though, and not a negligible one at that. Copyright, perfectly compatible – thanks to the “fair use” doctrine – with the collage of our forbears, clashes starkly with that of the children of the 21^st century. It has been turned into a weapon to control and repress the creativity of an entire generation.

The struggle against copyright’s stranglehold on a Culture which, in the space of not even a whole century, has become the exclusive preserve of a few captains of industry, has not proved equal to the task of freeing up this creative potential. So Lawrence Lessig came up with an alternative: a legal license to guarantee creators effective protection for their works, while letting them decide exactly how their works are to be involved in this cultural collage, this “remix culture”.

By electing to protect their works with a Creative Commons licence, creators can not only retain the option of commercial profiting from them, but they can decide how the works are to be used, remixed and distributed. By freeing itself from the unidimensional reign of copyright, which was perfectly adapted to the analog world of yesteryear, Creative Commons has launched and catalyzed the remix culture, ensuring the users thereof increased visibility, without cutting off potential sources of income.

If you want to find out about the historical background that led to this invention and fully appreciate the cultural ramifications of Creative Commons, I cannot urge you enough to read the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (disclaimer: I am the publisher of the French version, which is downloadable free of charge )  as well as his Remix (available only in English here ). And if you want to discover the various dimensions of Creative Commons licenses, this slideshow is made for you.

Fabrice Epelbouin is publisher and publication director of French Readwriteweb, http://fr.readwriteweb.com“