please let this become a trend

That’s the top-ranked comment on the Digg story about the first Academy Award winning film to be released under a Creative Commons license. Another Digg comment:

This is as good as apple pie or chocolate. I am very impressed. A thumbs up to the Interplast volunteer surgical team, and to the filmmakers. Plus a hug to those children and to their parents that waited on news about their child not knowing what kind of life their child may have. Those children are grown now in the film. 🙂 I hope their lives today are good too.

These and other comments show that there is a tremendous hunger for quality media whose owners have done the right thing — give their constituency at least some rights (this film is released under the most restrictive standard Creative Commons license), i.e., a tad of respect — and organizations that do the right thing get tremendous respect back.

Even the usual snarky comments call out the practical value of doing the right thing:

Yeah! This would have made TONS of money on DVD, but they decided to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Probably unrelated to the fact that it’s basically a PR package for Interplast, which will in turn cause people to donate money to Interplast.

I’m not taking away from what they do, but you’re a fool if you think this isn’t about money. There’s just more money to be made in donations (which is a good thing!) than selling a DVD of this short doc.

It’s true. If media isn’t earning tons of money through traditional channels and it promotes your organization or you, keeping the media locked up incurs huge opportunity costs.

Coming back to trends, a del.icio.us user’s bookmark description:

The first CC-licensed academy award winning film. Inconvenient Truth is next?

Why not? Inconvenient Truth is all about the opportunity costs of not acting.