The Scope of Open Licenses in Cultural Contents Production and Distribution

This paper aims to explore the impact of ex-ante legal status of creator on ex-post open license choice. It first describes the emergents Creative Commons licenses in Open Cultural Contents production and distribution. It introduces the two open models of diffusion and production, followed by creators. It orders the licenses according with their degree of openness in production as well as in diffusion. Then the paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of legal status of creators on open license choice using an original database of video under Creative Commons licenses, created from the Internet Archive. The results show the existence of two models, Open Diffusion model and Open Production, that the creator has to balance when he/she decides the license. The results also show that in order to obtain benefit from the community, the For-Profit actors are more likely to adopt a high degree of openness in license.