Prompt's TechBlog

Smiley Guy Studios, the maker of a Canadian television cartoon called Odd Job Jack, has made a plucky decision to give away its master files under a creative commons licence. You'll be able to download the flash files, the backgrounds, characters, and props and use them in your own productions. Amateur animators will be able to disassemble the Flash code for a broadcast cartoon for perhaps the first time.

Why is this a brave move? At a time when big media companies are terrified of the internet and strictly enforcing control over their output, Jack's creators are not just giving data away. They are giving away control. You are allowed to use their work to create derivative works, provided that the original authors are credited, your work is non-commercial and you grant people the same rights in your spin-off. Those rights are granted using a standard Creative Commons licence.

One of the criticisms often levelled at copyright law is that it stops people from building on our shared culture and stifles freedom of speech. Of course, that criticism assumes that the community as a whole has a greater claim to a piece of creative work than the person that first made it, which is highly contentious. In any case, by using a Creative Commons licence, Jack's creators have given anybody the creative freedom to critique, parody and regenerate their work.

What if Jack and friends are used to promote a political cause the cartoonists oppose? What if their characters are used to spread hatred? As far as I can see, there's nothing they can do about it, and this is a weakness in the Creative Commons system. It assumes that creators want to license usage based on how people reproduce and adapt their work and whether they make any money, and not based on who they are. We can all think of organisations and individuals who we wouldn't want to help promote their views, even if we respect their right to express them freely.

Of course, permission on a case by case basis would be completely unscalable. A key strength of Creative Commons is that it scales well: you decide your licence once, and your works go off into the world on their own adventures. You just have to be willing to release them into the wild.

Through this release, described by Jack's creators as 'a free gift to the entire planet', Smiley Guy Studios is investing in the next generation of cartoonists as well as giving the concept of Creative Commons a ringing endorsement.