The Future Exploration Network recently published a report on the future of media (pdf) that touches on many trends relevant to Creative Commons, including Creative Commons (and the report itself is CC licensed, of course):

Intellectual property and media

The Future of Media Strategic Framework is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
2.5 License. This means that while Future Exploration Network retains copyright you can use it – even
for commercial purposes – as long as you attribute it to the creator. It also means, that if you think it
should be different or want to improve on it, you can do so as long as you release it under the same
license – feel free to do so! There are a plethora of dilemmas and thorny issues for media organizations to
resolve in how they protect their own content, as well as license user-submitted content. Locking content
down will in many cases prove to be less valuable than allowing it to be reused appropriately by other content
creators. A living content landscape benefits content creators far more than a rigid world.

Strategic questions:

What licenses do you offer for user-submitted content?

In which situations should media-generated content have Creative Commons or similar licenses that allow reuse and adaptation?

I’m giving a twenty minute presentation on Creative Commons and the future of media at a Future Exploration Network summit tomorrow evening in San Francisco. Fortunately it looks like I won’t need to spend much time on the basics!

“Framework” graphic from the report, read for explanation.