Andy Warhol famously once said ‘art is anything you can get away with’ and those original words came from a Canadian poet.

Creative Commons works fundamentally to protect and share work in the grandeur of the digital marketplace. If you upload something- art, media, ideas- they are yours and yours alone to dictate how they can be used by others, especially if you desire your work to remain in it’s original form and without commercial gain for users.

It’s safe to generalise the use of Creative Commons as a common courtesy and social ideology. If you have produced something, you should be credited, right? There are other details (which you can watch here), but what I want to ask you is; where does this modernised yet conventional copyright attitude effectively stand within the idea of sharing online? Shouldn’t publications of knowledge or creative work be publicly accessible to ensure equality within the distribution of arts, education and socially relevant material? By ensuring your rights as the producer are you taking away the rights of another who is less educated or socially germane?

It’s a controversial debate that will always have momentum or personal affliction (for example, the beliefs of Aaron Swartz). At the end of the day individuals deserve credit and their paycheques- after all- it’s there work, their research, their life spent crafting an idea or sound or technology. Can there be balance in a world so geared towards digital downloading, copy and paste? It’s the grandeur of the digital marketplace that is changing things, for better and worse.