One of the best things about Creative Commons, the organization, is the passionate commitment of our entire board. In addition to volunteering thousands of hours over CC’s history, they’re responsible for the major donor fundraising that bootstrapped and sustains CC, but all of that goes on behind the scenes.

For the past few years we’ve added a public fundraising component, which has and will continue to be an increasing portion of CC’s overall support. CC board member Michael Carroll has posted his public appeal for CC support on his blog:

Creative Commons is asking for your support this year to enable us to continue the work we’ve been doing in promoting openness in the cultural, educational, and scientific fields. http://support.creativecommons.org/

If you support the vision, please help to staff the vision. Why? You might ask. How hard is it to host a web site?

Indeed. Please go read why, then click over to join Michael Carroll in supporting CC.

You can also check out Carroll and other CC board members on screen in Jesse Dylan’s A Shared Culture.

For even more Carroll and CC, read his paper on Creative Commons as Conversational Copyright. Here’s an excerpt for everyone, link and emphasis added:

As should now be clear, Creative Commons copyright licenses embody a vision of conversational copyright. Within this vision, creators or copyright owners seek to facilitate use of their expression for purposes such as dialog and education. A personal anecdote may bring the point home. I had been invited to participate in a panel discussion at an annual meeting of scholarly publishers. My fellow panelists were copyright lawyers, publishers, and others with a professional commitment to respect copyright law. The topic for discussion was the future of copyright law, and the panel agreed that it would be useful to show a topical eight-minute flash movie, available on the Internet and created by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with music by Aaron McLeran.

Within the eyes of U.S. copyright law, showing the entire video at a professional conference would be considered a public performance that requires a license. One might argue that the authors had granted such a license impliedly by placing the movie on the Internet. But the matter was not entirely clear. Indeed, in a preparatory conference call, one panelist asked about clearing the rights to show the video. Another panelist quickly rejoined, “Not a problem. It’s released under a Creative Commons license.” No further action was required to comply with the law. In this way, Creative Commons licenses enable creators to reach a wide audience and save busy audience members the time and effort of seeking permission to share the creators’ work. And, as it turned out, showing the video helped stimulate a very active and engaged dialog among the panelists and between the panel and the audience.

Yes, it is “Not a problem”, and CC does host a website, among other things. It costs money to make complex problems tractable. Please join Michael Carroll and the rest of our board in supporting Creative Commons.