Happy 5th Birthday, Creative Commons!
Last night Creative Commons celebrated the 5th anniversary of the launch of the Creative Commons licenses! I attended the San Francisco celebration -- JD Lasica has blogged what was a wonderful event. Also blogged by Freedom for IP.
In connection with the celebration, Science Commons announced a Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, to enable scientific databases to be legally integrated with each other.
I was asked to give a few words at the reception before the event about my involvement with Creative Commons. For me what was most remarkable were two things -- how Creative Commons has helped enable participatory media, and how Creative Commons represents an unprecedented collaboration by lawyers worldwide.
My law firm has been at the center of innovation in Silicon Valley, having taken Apple, Netscape and Google public, for example. I personally came back to Palo Alto fifteen years ago after practicing as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Back then we talked about “multimedia” and the promise of media and technology convergence.
But it turned out the promise couldn’t be realized just by corporations pursuing a holy grail of sorts, for many reasons. Some entrenched interests saw this as a side show for “ancillary rights,” or as a legal rights-clearance minefield, or as a potential threat to their core business models.
What happened instead as everyone knows in breaking down the barriers to convergence was consumer empowerment through technology -- the end to consumer passivity. Consumers deciding when, where and how to experience content. Consumers deciding to publish and share their own content – video, music, photos, blogs.
What was missing were tools for consumer empowerment, to enable the necessary legal licensing permissions. As a lawyer, Larry Lessig and the other founders saw how the perfect storm of digital copyrights could be an impediment to participatory media. Creative Commons created a solution, a legal licensing toolkit, in the manner that the open source software licenses gave developers tools to share their code.
We wanted to be part of the solution, so we joined the pro bono legal team at the outset. We’ve helped with the core licenses, some of the variations, and various legal issues along the way, for general counsels, Glenn Otis Brown and Mia Garlick, and now Virginia Rutledge.
In fact, the Creative Commons story involves a tremendous collaboration in the legal field. We worked as a team with other lawyers, including John Brockland – the goal was clarity so that creators and lawyers alike would have a usable document that people could actually understand and rely upon. The internationalization of the license on a country-by-country case is an unprecedented achievement, occasioned by the unique issues around content rights that vary by territory. It’s like a legal wiki and we’re proud to be a part of all that teamwork. Stanford Lawyer did an article a few years ago about it, called "Some Rights Reserved," which is posted here in this issue with my partner Nicki Locker on the cover.
To bring the media convergence story current, in the Web 2.0 world of long-tail content and participatory media, plenty of business ventures that we work with ask us how can they use Creative Commons and make those licenses an option for individuals who are sharing content on their social networks or publishing platforms.
To measure the reach of Creative Commons, I did a Google search yesterday and got 29 million results. To put it in perspective, that beats Elvis Presley at 21 million and American Idol’s 27 million. However Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are still way ahead at 42 and 62 million respectively, so there’s clearly still plenty of opportunity!
So here’s to 5 years of hard work by everyone and to the great success of Creative Commons, the incredible passion and energy of the dedicated people literally throughout the world who have made Creative Commons what it is today, and to its bright future!
