In 2004, designer and animator Justin Cone created “Building on the Past” as part of our Moving Images Contest and won. Justin originally made the video, which demonstrated Creative Commons’ mission in two minutes, available under CC BY-NC. At the encouragement of Wikieducator’s Wayne Macintosh, Justin decided to re-release “Building on the Past” under the most open CC license, CC Attribution (CC BY) and made a short video explaining why (also under CC BY). Both videos are featured in Creative Commons unplugged, a part of Wikieducator’s Open content licensing 4 educators workshop (a work in progress).

In the video, Justin talks about why CC is so important to him:

“Creative Commons is important to me for two reasons: The first reason is that it just makes life easier. I don’t have to worry about law suits or trying to secure permissions from people who might be impossible to get in touch with. It just makes creation easier and encourages the exchange of ideas; it encourages discussion and education. The second reason is a little more symbolic. By putting the CC license on my work, it basically says I care enough to share. I feel like I’m taking part in a community just by licensing my work with CC.”

He goes on to explain why he changed the license of his film:

“Originally I licensed my “Building on the Past” video with an Attribution-Noncommercial license. And I think the noncommercial part was there because I was just generally suspicious about corporate interest or something. It wasn’t very well thought out, but I think I was worried that somebody would take the video, re-contextualize it in a way that wasn’t appropriate for the video. Since then, I’ve kind of changed the way that I think about things. The video has been showed around the world; it has been translated and subtitled in different languages and it has taken on a life of its own. And I think that it deserves to be a little freer. There’s no reason to keep it from being used by a commercial interest because I think it has some educational value. I think it has a message that can be debated, discussed, disagreed with or agreed with, and by removing the noncommercial part of my license, it’s easier for people to now do all those things.”

At the end, he offers tips for other creators, saying we should ask ourselves two questions: “Is this project bigger than me?” and “When you finish a project, is this really the end of the project, or is this the beginning?” If your answer is affirmative in both cases, Justin notes that CC “makes it so much easier for your project to expand beyond you”:

“I like to think of projects as stories. So if you choose a traditional copyright, then the story of your project has just a limited number of possible endings. And sometimes those endings are fine and they work for the story. But a lot of times it’s more interesting to choose a different path for your story. And if you go with a Creative Commons license you’re basically saying, I don’t want this story to end. I want it to go on and on. I want it to have different endings, different twists and turns rather, and I want other people to tell this story. I think that’s a better story, it’s a more exciting story; it’s epic.”

Watch the whole meta-video here, and share “Building on the Past” under CC BY from the Internet Archive, Blip.tv, and Vimeo.

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