One of the great things about Creative Commons licenses (in my opinion) is that many of them allow for derivative works to be created. Derivative works are extremely popular in common culture. For example many Walt Disney movies are derivative works of earlier fairy tales (e.g. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty). Westside Story is a derivative of Romeo and Juliet, and Shakespeare in turn created many of his plays based on the earlier works of others. Some derivatives are additions to storylines, others are simply translations or changes to file formats.

But copyright blocks most deriviatives; Creative Commons on the hand, lets authors/publishers allow for derivatives if they so choose.

Some authors believe that by allowing derivative works to be created that they will extend the impact of their books. For example, in a personal email James Boyle (The Public Domain, among others), wrote “Scholars have a professional responsibility to make their works as widely available, without price barriers, as is possible.” In addition to this moral reasoning, he said that because of open licensing, “I reach new audiences that I couldn’t have imagined.”

I believe that allowing derivatives can extend the reach of a work. For example, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University published his book Free Culture in 2004. Lessig used a Creative Commons license to allow other to create derivative works. As a results it has been translated into seven different languages, audio versions are freely available, and it has been put into sixteen different file formats (Free Culture Derivatives/Remixes, n.d.). All of these translations and format changes are freely available for others to download. Allowing others to create derivatives Free Culture vastly expanded its reach.

Right now I’m interested in the movationas individuals have for creating derivatives such as those done for Free Culture. Why do people to create translations, audio versions and make file format changes of materials that have Creative Commons licenses?

I have found many for works by Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, as well as some for works by James Boyle and Jonathan Zittrain. Are you aware of other situations in which authors have allowed derivative works and had people take them up on the offer? I would love to hear about them!