Creative Commons kicks off its global case studies effort. Share your story. Discover new works and new models.

With upwards of 150 million CC-licensed works published from every corner of the world, no single use case can tell the whole story. Creators and users come to CC for different reasons, and for many, CC solves different problems. We’re trying to capture the diversity of CC creators and content by building a resource that inspires new works and informs free culture.

Creative Commons Case Studies 2009 kicks off today – and we want to hear your story! We’re collecting cases big and small on our re-launched Case Studies wiki, an online portal to upload and discover documentation about CC-licensed projects.

The top community curated stories will be featured on our website and in the next printed volume of Creative Commons Case Studies. You’ll also collaborate with our CEO, Joi Ito, whose doctoral work focuses on select case studies about CC and the sharing economy.

How to get involved

• Visit the Case Studies wiki and learn about how people are using CC licenses around the world. Browse existing studies and download Building an Australasian Commons: Creative Commons Case Studies Volume I, a stunning publication edited by Rachel Cobcroft and supported by CC Australia. The book highlights 60 exemplary CC-licensed users in Australasia and worldwide. Source files and PDFs are available for the entire book and easily digestible booklets covering particular fields.
• Curate a collection of case studies with PediaPress, a service that builds an OpenOffice document, PDF, or printed book from selected wiki pages. Publish your collection on a site that supports CC licenses such as Scribd. Tailor the material to meet your needs and add your entry to list of case study collections.
• Teach with real-life examples. We’re encouraging educators to follow CC Australia’s lead and integrate the CC Case Studies into their curricula. Teaching with case studies is compelling and instructive. Have your students analyze existing studies or write their own.
• Most importantly, add your CC story, or one you’re familiar with. Improve, categorize, and assess existing case studies. We’re particularly interested in the addition of data relevant to the cases.

Not sure what a good case study looks like? Check out these featured submissions: Blender Foundation, SomeRightsReserved, and the African Sleeping Sickness Test.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration, business models, or precedents, the CC Case Studies are a perfect place to start. Help us expand this resource by sharing your work and telling your story.

Can you give our readers some background on what SomeRightsReserved does? What makes you different from other design firms?

SomeRightsReserved is our digital publishing platform. It features a wide variety of ‘products’ ranging from laser cut ready design, to books and music. The group of designers behind the shop, KithKin, are primarily from a design background, but the shop is not limited by genre or discipline.

The initial thoughts that led to the development of SomeRightsReserved arouse from a desire from several of the designers to make and sell their designs and creations. In design this traditionally means a protracted period of time of development, testing, protecting your idea, and then getting made, then trying to sell it. Oh and finding the money to do so.

Now we can conceive an idea, refine it in a day and publish it the next. We publish almost anything in a digital format, whether it be rapid prototype files, which can be used to produce physical objects, to subversive pieces of viral software.

We let designers and creatives publish their products on their terms, exhibiting and touring their work offline and online.

SomeRightsReserved features everything from typeface to furniture blueprints to music. How do you connect with the artists and designers featured on your site? How receptive are they to using free and open means of distribution?

We contact people we like, people who like us find us. It works both ways. It’s an opinionated selection process, with KithKin members deciding. Mainly we are looking for things that push the concept, or work in context with it.

You get two types of people when you explain the concept. One is confused by the notion of floating their ideas around on the internet. They come from an educational system, certainly in design, which preaches the value of IP and patents.

The others get it straight away. They relish the idea of sharing their idea with the world, and take comfort in their ability to produce hundreds of good ideas in the future.

Some of the products at SomeRightsReserved are free to download, others you need to pay for. How do you decide what to give away for free? More specifically, how are CC licenses used in your transactions?

Both decisions on licenses and price are made by the designers themselves.

The whole project really is experimentation with the notion of value. People are plucking prices from thin air, deciding the value of ones and zeros. It’s a strange process.

Your slogan is “A Download Revolution” – what does that mean?

A download revolution sums up our ethos. You’re not meant to give things away for free, your not meant to publish the blueprints & instructions to your ideas, your not meant to let people copy your work, improve upon it or share it. But we do. its different, at first it seems illogical, but hopefully its the start for a whole new generation of similar thinkers.

Why don’t we see more people selling CC licensed materials?

I guess you have to be brave, or stupid. It goes against logic to say, one person can buy the product, share it legally, then all their friends can enjoy it, and all their friends, and all their friends, and your sat their on one sale.

But for us I don’t think SomeRightsReserved is about money, its about getting ideas out there, in a medium that is becoming increasingly prominent, and accessible, in our culture.

For us, and the people involved it’s a wise move, as the promotion and marketing value of what we are doing far outweighs the costs.

Your work is primarily featured online, but lately you have had some real-world showings. How did those go? As a web-based entity, did you find that your ethos translated to a non-digital space?

We came to the project as designers, and the concept arouse with a simultaneous launch of the shop online, and a shop at DesignersBlock in Milan April 08.

We really played with the whole notion of the shop when developing our offline presence. In England there are fake DVD sellers who come round offering discs for a pound. We referenced these for the visual language of our packaging. For the shop space a traditional east end market stall seemed the natural choice.

We were the pirates, selling the hi quality stuff for dirt-cheap prices in the surroundings of plush limited edition furniture and boozy champagne parties.

Is there anything interesting on your horizon? Anything else you’d like our readers to know?

We’re building our product listings, and no doubt the shop will be making more appearances in different guises in the future. The breath and possibility is almost endless.

One area that interests me personally is bringing some of the technology needed to make a selection of the physical products together in one place, to create a pop up digital production line. Someone can come buy the file, put it on a usb key, walk over to the laser cutter, load the file and watch as their product is created in front of them.

We are taking some products from the shop to Covent Garden, London this November with DesignersBlock, more info will be online at www.kith-kin.co.uk