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Making Book

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Creative Commons

June 3, 2026 //

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 knees have jerked, and, as CCO is taking evasive action, presumably quite a lot of knees. "In June 2025, CCO took a step in the direction of helping authors try to rein in the massive reuse of their CC-licensed products by introducing CC Signals" — which merely indicate the creator’s preferences for method of reuse. One doubts if an LLM, seeing you prefer they shouldn’t access your piece, will desist. Mr Anderson asks seven questions of the Creative Commons Organization, exploring their stance (and indicating the illogicality of much of what they’ve done).

This story highlights the illogicality lying behind so much of the opposition to AI. Just because it’s computers, just because it’s Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Altman, whoever, we know it’s wrong. Now in the case of authors who didn’t do CC BY, there’s a bit of an argument. Maybe they do deserve some small reimbursement for the use of their writing in LLMs, but free access is free access, and if you granted it for the good of humanity, how come getting a good answer from AI isn’t serving humanity just as much as someone copying and quoting your words in a journal article is? Of course Nottingham frame knitters couldn’t see how power looms were going to end up being for their benefit, but surely in the world of academe we have been trained to think things through.

Ted Gioia gives us a roundup of legislation around the world seeking to rein in AI, commenting that "Silicon Valley has totally lost public support, and now will get punished brutally with legislation". Obviously my laissez faire attitude is shared by only a ludicrously small minority of which Anne Trubek appears to be one. She writes "I haven’t found a coherent explanation for why it’s fine to use AI to look at sales data from a new angle but not for editing, without leaning on what I find to be erroneous definitions of ‘creative’, or why it’s fine for research but not editing (is there a difference? what is it?)"

I’m getting a bit bored with the way every discussion seems to lead us back to just how awful AI is. I’d like to stop writing about it, but I’m not sure I can — at least until the happy day when most of us see it not as a threat but as an opportunity.

* One might imagine that the option of simply not claiming copyright would work just as well, but that route is not available, since under the law a work is automatically copyrighted by being communicated in fixed form.

Creative Commons

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