Creative Commons

The Scholarly Kitchen brings us a piece by Rick Anderson about this form of licensing. “In 2002 the Creative Commons Organization (CCO) created a suite of licenses that copyright holders can apply to their works in order to make them available for free reuse by the public.”* Their most inclusive license format is CC BY, which provides permission for the work to be “translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor” as long as the original creator of the work is acknowledged. Mr Anderson indicates that one “unintended consequence” of a CC license was the ability for Large Language Models to gobble up content freely available via open access, and use it in the training of their chatbots. Now this is of course true, but surely if you have decided to allow free access to your material, why should you care whether that access is via a human or a machine? Nevertheless it seems some…