San Francisco, CA, USA – July 24, 2009

Creative Commons, a global nonprofit focused on the growth and preservation of openly shareable and reusable culture, science, and education, officially announced today that Glenn Otis Brown has rejoined the organization as a member of its board of directors. Brown was CC’s executive director from 2002-2005 and is currently YouTube’s music business development manager.

As one of the core members of the Creative Commons team in the organization’s early days, Brown was instrumental in developing many of CC’s earliest successes, including the first two versions of its machine-readable copyright licenses, its international expansion, and the remix-friendly Wired CD and accompanying Wired Magazine cover story. Brown subsequently joined Google as a products counsel, where he worked on projects including Google Image Search, Blogger, Google Talk, the Google WiFi initiative, and Google Sitemaps. As the music business development manager for YouTube, Brown works with major and independent labels, publishers, and artists to build new business opportunities around both official music videos and fan-made tributes.

“We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Glenn join the board,” says Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “As Executive Director of the organization in its early days, Glenn established many of the critical ideas and relationships that CC is built upon today. That background, combined with his experience in developing creative projects and partnerships at YouTube, gives him particularly valuable insight into the opportunities for Creative Commons in the worlds of business, media, and culture at large.”

“It’s great to be involved with Creative Commons again,” Brown says. “It’s both humbling and exciting to see how much the organization has grown in influence and reach. Seven years ago, there was no easy way for creative people to declare ‘Some Rights Reserved,’ to invite open interaction with their work, while keeping their copyrights. Today, Creative Commons is the go-to solution for safe, legal sharing for folks as different as Ridley Scott, Wikipedia, MIT, or President Obama’s transition team.”

Brown joins a board of directors that includes technologist Joi Ito, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, cyberlaw and intellectual property experts Lawrence Lessig, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Eric Saltzman, Flickr founder Caterina Fake, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, and Public Knowledge founder Laurie Racine.

Glenn Otis Brown biography

Glenn Otis Brown is currently the music business development manager at YouTube. Before that, he worked as a products counsel at Google, where he worked on Google Image Search, Blogger, Google Talk, the Google WiFi initiative, and Google Sitemaps, among many other projects. Glenn was Executive Director of Creative Commons from summer 2002 through spring 2005. In 2003-2004, Glenn was a lecturer at Stanford Law School, where he co-taught a class on copyright licensing with Lawrence Lessig. He clerked for the Honorable Stanley Marcus on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Miami, where he worked on the Wind Done Gone copyright appeal, among other cases. Glenn has also worked stints at The Economist’s Washington D.C. bureau, reporting on general U.S. news during the 2000 elections, and at “Digital Age,” a New York public TV show hosted by Andrew Shapiro, where he was assistant producer for a season. Glenn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin (B.A.) and Harvard Law School (JD). Glenn was a member of the Harvard Law Review and worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he organized the first Signal or Noise conference and concert in cooperation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He lives in San Francisco and plays in a band called Magic Me.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit https://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
eric@creativecommons.org