Lessig and others offer “Open Government” principles

Eric Steuer, December 2nd, 2008

A short follow-up to our post from yesterday about how Change.gov is now available under a Creative Commons license: Lawrence Lessig announces a set of “open government” principles intended to guide the Obama-Biden transition team’s use of the Internet. Visit open-government.us for the letter and video that outline these principles, and read Ben Smith’s post on Politico for more information about this project.

HarperStudio Interviews Joi Ito

Fred Benenson, December 2nd, 2008

HarperStudio, an imprint of the world renown publishers Harper Collins, has an interview with Joi Ito, our CEO. In his answers, Joi tackles some of the more complex implications of Creative Commons licensing for media like books:

2) Does Creative Commons have different implications for different forms of media? Would books be affected differently than music, for example?

Joi Ito: … In the case of book publishing, we have seen a variety of different examples. The basic consideration is how much demand the book already has versus the potential demand that a free download version of the book might create. Clearly there is some cannibalization of sales if people who were going to buy the book end up reading it online. However, we have quite a bit of data which supports the fact that making the book available for free increases the likelihood that the book will get stronger coverage on blogs and word of mouth and also find its way into markets not typically marketed to by the publishers. If, for instance, one allows derivative works, a good book will often quickly get translated, whole or in part, which can drive demand in International markets.

Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the future of publishing and CC.

Update: HarperStudio also points us towards Lawrence Lessig’s appearance on KQED.

Iron Man and the Right Not to Be Attributed

Fred Benenson, December 2nd, 2008

When Jeremy Keith, a web developer living and working in England took a photo of Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral and posted it to Flickr under our Attribution license (which seems to be the flavor of the month around here), he had no idea it was eventually going to end up in the blockbuster feature film Iron Man.

After explaining the terms of the CC license to a studio representative interested in using the photo in the film, Jeremy was told that it would costs at least $1500 to be attributed in the credits. So the studio offered the next best thing in lieu of being attributed properly: cash. But Jeremy turned the money down and just signed the license release anyway.

Besides being another example of Hollywood utilizing CC licensed material, this story offers insight into why we developed the CC+ protocol. CC+ is designed to help creators negotiate rights outside the scope of the license. For a lot of cases, this turns out to be our NonCommercial provision — that is, musicians offer their music to their fans under NC and use CC+ to point commercial users to a 3rd party rights broker (like Magnatune) that handles commercial rights negotiation on behalf of the artist. But here we can see another right being negotiated, that of attribution, which shows just how flexible CC licenses are.

Remember, when you’re the creator and owner of a copyrighted work, you have ultimate say over who does what with your work; CC licenses merely help you negotiate the thicket of what that “what” is.

Thanks go to Jeremy for writing up such an important example of CC licensed works being used in the wild.

Urgent: Your input needed for “NonCommercial” questionnaire

Mike Linksvayer, December 2nd, 2008

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

Your input is greatly appreciated. CC CEO Joi Ito explains:

“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”

You can also help by sending your friends and colleagues to the questionnaire.

If you don’t have time to help CC in this way, remember that we’re in the midst of our annual fundraising campaign.

Contributing in both ways would be ideal. :-)

CC licenses are an important^* part of the digital infrastructure and debate. Your financial contributions and your feedback are both crucial to the ongoing development of this infrastructure.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

^* The ‘important’ link above points out a recent extraordinarily important and visible use of the CC BY license, which does not include the NC term. As Joi points out in the quote above, we also want to provide information about contexts in which NC is not appropriate. So please take the questionnaire if you care about public copyright licenses, even if you don’t like or don’t use ones with the NonCommercial term. Thanks!

Clive Thompson on the Hybrid T-Shirt Economy

Cameron Parkins, December 2nd, 2008

A great article in the most recent WIRED, Clive Thompson on How T-Shirts Keep Online Content Free, discusses the growing hybrid economy developed by purveyors of free content looking for a stable source of income. Their answer? Schwag in general, t-shirts in particular:

Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don’t limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans’ desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

While Thompson doesn’t mention CC directly (he does mention Jonathan Coulton, a CC-staff favorite and current partner in our fundraising drive), he hints at the mentality behind our CC+ initiative and generally argues that openness is an important component of functional business models going forward.