Over the past three decades, open licensing has evolved from hacker culture thought experiment to a transformative force in applied copyright across a range of industries. Yet very little empirical research exists to understand its disparate uses. This article examines social practices and attitudes about open licensing in order to examine the practical experience of creators and consumers who use this tool and in order to assess its value in moderating the negative consequences of extensive copyright. The discussion about the role of open licensing in creative industries and communities tends to be polarized into two vantage points. Either (1) it is a new, altruistic paradigm enabling creative communities to rework copyright to fit their vision for the cultural commons, or (2) it is a radical theft of creative labor, encouraged by Google and other digital industrial powerhouses, to cheat creators out of their share of profits. Both of these rhetorical vantage points presume a monolithic and largely either selfless or unaware base of creative laborers. We analyze data from a series of surveys across a range of creative fields and practices to show that creators employ open licensing for a variety of reasons, including instrumental purposes oriented toward skirting the many impediments created by institutions and law, rather than merely because they are unaware or selfless.

中文翻译：

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版权给予者和接受者：开放许可中的互惠，利他主义和工具主义

在过去的三十年中，开放式许可已从黑客文化思想实验演变为一系列行业中应用版权的变革力量。然而，很少有实证研究可以理解其不同的用途。本文研究了有关开放许可的社会实践和态度，以研究使用此工具的创作者和消费者的实践经验，并评估其在减轻广泛版权的负面影响方面的价值。关于开放许可在创意产业和社区中的作用的讨论倾向于分为两个优势。（1）这是一种新的无私的范式，它使创意社区可以重新制作版权，以符合他们对文化公地的愿景，或者（2）这是对创意劳动的彻底盗窃，在Google和其他数字工业巨头的鼓励下，欺骗了创作者以分享他们的利润。这两个夸夸其谈的观点都假定了一个整体的，很大程度上是无私的或无意识的创造性劳动者的基地。我们分析了来自一系列创新领域和实践的一系列调查中的数据，显示出创作者出于各种原因而采用开放许可，包括旨在避开机构和法律所造成的诸多障碍的工具性目的，而不仅仅是因为无意识或无私。