Acknowledgements

Creative Commons would like to acknowledge the many contributions of staff, consultants, sponsors, and supporters responsible for producing The Power of Open. A very special thanks goes to the organizations, artists, and creators who not only share their work with CC licenses, but shared their time and insights to be profiled in this book.

Visit http://thepowerofopen.org to download a digital version of The Power of Open or to find out how to order print copies.

Credits

This book uses two public domain fonts available via The League of Moveable Type: League Gothic and Goudy Bookletter 1911. For more information see http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com.

The double C in a circle, the words and logotype “Creative Commons,” and the Creative Commons license buttons are trademarks of Creative Commons. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/policies.

Except where otherwise noted, content in The Power of Open, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. For the terms of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

Introduction

BY Catherine CASSERLY / CEO, CREATIVE COMMONS Joi ITO / CHAIR, CREATIVE COMMONS

The world has experienced an explosion of openness. From individual artists opening their creations for input from others, to governments requiring publicly funded works be available to the public, both the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results.

Creative Commons began providing licenses for the open sharing of content only a decade ago. Now more than 400 million CC-licensed works are available on the Internet, from music and photos, to research findings and entire college courses. Creative Commons created the legal and technical infrastructure that allows effective sharing of knowledge, art and data by individuals, organizations and governments. More importantly, millions of creators took advantage of that infrastructure to share work that enriches the global commons for all humanity.

The Power of Open, collects the stories of those creators. Some are like ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization that uses CC while partnering with the world’s largest media companies. Others like nomadic filmmaker Vincent Moon use CC licensing as an essential element of a lifestyle of openness in pursuit of creativity. The breadth of uses is as great as the creativity of the individuals and organizations choosing to open their content, art and ideas to the rest of the world.

As we look ahead, the field of openness is approaching a critical mass of adoption that could result in sharing becoming a default standard for the many works that were previously made available only under the all-rights-reserved framework. Even more exciting is the potential increase in global welfare from the use of Creative Commons’ tools and the increasing relevance of openness to the discourse of culture, education and innovation policy.

We hope that The Power of Open inspires you to examine and embrace the practice of open licensing so that your contributions to the global intellectual commons can provide their greatest benefit to all people.

About Creative Commons

Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet – universal access to culture, education and research – to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.

The idea of universal access to research, education and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

What we provide

Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work – a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright – which makes their creative, educational and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs.

For those creators wishing to opt out of copyright altogether, and to maximize the interoperability of data, Creative Commons also provides tools that allow work to be placed as squarely as possible in the public domain.

Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet – universal access to culture, education and research – to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.

Where we're going

We build infrastructure at Creative Commons. Our users build the commons itself. We are working to increase the adoption of our tools, to support and listen to our users, and to serve as a trusted steward of interoperable commons infrastructure.

Your support

In order to achieve the vision of an Internet full of open content, where users are participants in innovative culture, education and science, we depend on the backing of our users and those who believe in the potential of the Internet. We are alive and thriving thanks to the generous support of people like you. Spread the word about CC to your friends and family, and donate to help maintain Creative Commons as a robust, long-lived, and stable organization.

Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation.

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions and get credit for their creative work while allowing others to copy, distribute and make specific uses of it. Licensors have a wide range of options for choosing which permissions to grant and uses to allow.

Creative Commons licenses incorporate a unique and innovative three-layer design. The first layer is the “legal code,” consisting of traditional legal tools applicable around the world. This is supplemented with a “human-readable” explanation in more user-friendly language accessible to most creators. The final layer is a “machine-readable” description that software systems, search engines and other technology can understand and use to make searching for and utilizing CC-licensed works more convenient.

Taken together, the licenses' three layers ensure that the spectrum of rights covered by our tools isn’t something only lawyers can understand. It’s something that the creators of works can understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand.

Attribution (CC BY)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)

This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same

license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)

This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)

This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Creative Commons also provides tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain. Our CC! tool allows licensors to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain, and our Public Domain Mark allows any Web user to “mark” a work as being in the public domain.

CC0 Public Domain Dedication

CC! enables owners of copyright-protected content to waive copyright interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright. In contrast to Creative Commons licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC! empowers yet another choice altogether — the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants creators.

Public Domain Mark

Public Domain Mark (PDM) is a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s public domain status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC! or the CC licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC! and CC licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine-readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet.

Creative Commons Stories

TED Talks

June Cohen
Free to Spread Ideas / New York

“This phenomenal growth is entirely driven by free and open distribution, CC licensing has enabled sharing in ways well beyond what we could have done on our own.”

MORE INFO: http://www.ted.com/talks

Now a mainstay of the online ecosystem, TED Talks started at exclusive seminars attended by a select few. Five years after publishing all TED Talks online under Creative Commons licenses, more than 200 million viewers have experienced the innovative thinking of TED speakers.

“This phenomenal growth is entirely driven by free and open distribution,” says June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media. “CC licensing has enabled sharing in ways well beyond what we could have done on our own.”

“When we decided to open our library, we had one single goal: to spread ideas,” Cohen says. “Every decision we made was based on that goal. Creative Commons was the most efficient way to empower the growth of our product and free us from conversations about what could or couldn’t be done with our videos.

“Sharing online was a very controversial decision. People feared it would capsize our business, discourage people from paying for our conference, and be rejected by speakers.

“The first year after releasing videos of talks for free, we raised the cost of the conference by 50 percent and sold out in one week with a 1,000 person waiting list,” Cohen says. “Not only do speakers lobby for the talks to be posted as soon as possible, but paying conference participants are anxious to share talks they just heard with family, friends and colleagues.”

TED Talks featuring Swedish medical doctor and statistician Hans Rosling and his presentations on developing countries show how CC licenses can popularize a subject. “Hans told me that posting his first TED Talk online did more to impact his career than all of the other things he had done previously,” Cohen says. “It opened up a whole new world for him.”

“Our unintended consequences have been explosively positive,” Cohen says. “It is not just the growth, but the way that our global audience has become a global team, embracing our brand and encouraging further innovation. A Creative Commons license clearly communicates that you are really serious about the spread of ideas.” is entirely driven by free and open distribution, CC licensing has enabled sharing in ways well beyond what we could have done on our own.”

Jonathan Worth

Picturing a New Model for Professional Photographers / London

“We don’t have all the answers, but CC lets me choose my ﬂavor and helps me take advantage of the things working against me.”

MORE INFO: http://www.jonathanworth.com

British photographer Jonathan Worth’s work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. He teaches photography at Coventry University in the U.K. He has photographed actors Colin Firth, Rachel Hunter, Jude Law and Heath Ledger. He is also one of an emerging group of photographers experimenting with sustainable working practices for professional image makers in the digital age.

Worth, like almost all working pros, used to spend hours scouring the Internet to protect his images from theft. He was angry about the amount of time he wasted in pursuing breaches of his copyright. “Then I ran into science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who was giving his book away and making money from it,” Worth says. “I photographed him once and asked him what the deal was. He proposed an experiment.”

Worth signed on. They put a Creative Commons BY license on the image and shared high-resolution copies for free online while selling signed prints at various prices and levels of exclusivity. “The most expensive sold first,” said Worth. “No one had ever heard of me, but they were paying good money for my prints.”

Doctorow had given Worth a lesson on the new digital world and people’s digital habits. “Now I can understand how to leverage the forces of people using my images for free,” says Worth. “It’s like putting a message in a bottle and the tides can take it anywhere under its own steam and you can take advantage of those forces.”

“Creative Commons enables me to use existing architecture really smoothly and to address the digital natives’ social media habits,” Worth says. “The mode of information is the same, but the mode of distribution has changed. We don’t have all the answers, but CC lets me choose my ﬂavor and helps me take advantage of the things working against me.”

Nina Paley

Singing the Praises of Open / New York

“I’ve never had more money coming at me than when I started using Creative Commons BY-SA. I have a higher proﬁle. I don’t spend anything on promotion. My fans are doing it for me and buying merchandise. Sharing put me on the map.”

MORE INFO: http://www.ninapaley.com

“Being on the same side as my fans feels great,” says Nina Paley, a New York City filmmaker, cartoonist and champion of open licensing. While many artists have become antagonistic with their fans, she can only see the benefits to artists from sharing their work. And yes, one benefit is money.

Paley’s conversion to openness was gradual. As a young cartoonist, the notion of creating intellectual property was ﬂattering and constantly reinforced. “Everyone told me how copyright provided protection and status,” she says. “Imagining a world without it was nearly impossible.”

In 2008, the release of her self-produced, animated movie “Sita Sings the Blues” was delayed by the prohibitive cost of licensing several 80-year-old songs from little-known singer Annette Hanshaw. “When my ﬁlm was still illegal and hemorrhaging money to legal and licensing costs, I joked that if the ﬁlm were free, I could sell T-shirts,” Paley recalls. The idea lingered and she researched how people made a living giving away free software. “I realized that merchandise and voluntary support is actually where the money comes from,” says Paley.

“Sita Sings the Blues” was ﬁnally released to acclaim from Roger Ebert and other critics. It is available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license for anyone to download for free; it is also available for purchase on DVD, and theatrically through other distributors. It has been viewed millions of times worldwide through archive.org, YouTube, and innumerable torrent sites.

Paley takes issue with how money is used to value art. “When an artist is broke, you start thinking that it has to do with the value of their work, which it doesn’t,” she says. “I have also seen artists who refused to create unless they got paid.” For Paley, the opposite is true. “I’ve never had more money coming at me than when I started using Creative Commons BY-SA. I have a higher proﬁle. I don’t spend anything on promotion. My fans are doing it for me and buying merchandise. Sharing put me on the map.”

ProPublica

Richard Tofel & Scott Klein
Making News by Sharing the Story / New York

“We aren’t building a copyright library. We have a culture of sharing and CC is a big part of it.”

MORE INFO: http://www.propublica.org.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization ProPublica launched in 2007 with a clear mission to pursue stories that made an impact. According to General Manager Richard Tofel, “We knew that the more people who saw our stories the better off we would be, and the better we would fulfill our mission.” What was not so clear was how to easily allow others to reprint their work.

“Two of our early hires were familiar with Creative Commons and suggested it as the best way to accomplish our sharing goal,” Tofel says. “It has worked very well and saves us an enormous amount of time.”

Scott Klein, editor of news applications for ProPublica, was one of those early CC promoters. “Our website is our platform,” said Klein. “We are not worried about sharing our stories if it helps them get impact.” Creative Commons licensing provides the ability for others to republish ProPublica stories without negotiations. “Otherwise, they would have to call in, ask about the story and have us explain the uses,” says Klein. “That would be much too cumbersome.”

As one of the largest investigative newsrooms in the United States, ProPublica has consistently succeeded in inﬂuencing subjects it investigates. Collaborating with large national news organizations, ProPublica exposed deep ﬂaws in the licensing of nurses in California and focused attention on officer-involved shootings in post-Katrina New Orleans. A story with Time Magazine on triage decisions in New Orleans hospitals in the days following Katrina was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. More recently, ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for national affairs reporting for their coverage of the financial industry.

“We don’t see the information as a valuable object, it’s the impact that matters,” says Klein. “We aren’t building a copyright library. We have a culture of sharing and CC is a big part of it.”

Tofel agrees. “Creative Commons helps us to get the stories out, which broadens our readership and deepens the impact of individual stories,” he says. “But it also helps build awareness of who we are, and that works to the benefit of both the individual story and the future of ProPublica.”

Yunyu

A Basket of Nice Surprises / New South Wales

"I’d like to see a conversation with the industry to see how we can move the spirit of Creative Commons forward."

MORE INFO: http://www.yunyu.com.au

For Australian songwriter and musician Yunyu, mixing media comes naturally. Sharing work with other artists and fans isn’t something she fears, but is a productive extension of her creative process.

Yunyu credits open licensing for a successful collaboration with science fiction author Marianne de Pierres, for whom Yunyu wrote and recorded a song to accompany a young adult novel. “The publicity around my release of music for free with a Creative Commons license brought us together in the spirit of art,” she says.

The original decision to use CC licenses was part of a musical exploration. “I mostly wanted to see what was possible with my music, where you could take it,” says Yunyu. “I wondered if I set things free what people would do with them.”

“I had no idea what to expect, but what I got was a whole basket of nice surprises,” she says. Fans began making videos of her songs and posting them on YouTube. One young woman from Detroit used several lyrics to create a portrait that ended up on a popular science fiction website. An all-female French band has recorded one of her songs and video game designers have shown interest in licensing her music.

“From a songwriter’s perspective, it is difficult to discuss open licensing with the music industry, which still has concerns about the full meaning and repercussions of Creative Commons licenses. I’d like to see a conversation with the industry to see how we can move the spirit of Creative Commons forward,” she says. “Trying to control how your work’s to be interpreted and enjoyed on a noncommercial level is a lot like trying to kill a hydra. You are going to fail spectacularly.”

She adds: “Artists need some basic protections and need to be reimbursed for the use of their music commercially, but I really can’t imagine needing any more protection beyond that. I can’t see going after a fan who enjoys your work enough to share and remix it. That doesn’t seem to make sense.”

DJ Vadim

Mixing it Up Around the Globe / Berlin & London

"Music is a conversation, between creators and listeners, each bringing their own experiences to the melting pot."

MORE INFO: http://www.djvadim.com

Born in Leningrad, Russia, and raised in London, DJ Vadim has become a hip-hop and electronic music force around the globe. He has worked as a producer and performed with legendary artists including Stevie Wonder, The Roots, Prince and Public Enemy. He’s also released many albums of his own under various monikers.

When he looks for inspiration and new talent, Vadim uses ccMixter, a community remix site, to allow other producers to download his Creative Commons-licensed tracks and remake them to their own liking.

Three thousand people have downloaded the tracks from Vadim’s ccMixter contests and created more than 500 remixes. According to Ben Dawson, who works for DJ Vadim’s record label, Organically Grown Sounds, “People were uploading their remixes and then sharing them with their friends, which brought a lot of attention to the music. This is a great way to let people get involved in the music and put some emotion, heart and soul into it rather than just listening on the radio.”

“Vadim travels around the world constantly, collaborating and chatting with vocalists, musicians and other DJs and giving them feedback,” says Dawson. “Now the Internet provides ways for us to do this in more and more ways, from our use of ccMixter and other great music platforms.”

Collaboration like this is critical, Vadim says. “OGS is all about collaboration, writing the songs with people we meet on our journeys around the world. Music is a conversation, between creators and listeners, each bringing their own experiences to the melting pot.”

Global Voices

Solan Larsen Spreading the News / Global

"Creative Commons gives us the liberty to facilitate translations into more than a dozen languages daily."

MORE INFO: http://globalvoicesonline.org

Big media can fall short in delivering in-depth information on world events – local bloggers and citizen journalists are often much more tuned into the communities they write about. Global Voices, a nonprofit started by journalist Rebecca MacKinnon, provides a platform for 350 editors and volunteer authors and translators from around the world to bring news from their communities to one place. These citizen journalists have provided detailed and timely coverage of everything from the earthquake in Haiti to the protests in Iran. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons BY license, so that the information can be translated and disseminated freely to those who seek more than just the snapshots provided in the evening news.

When protests against joblessness caused riots in Tunisia last December, Global Voices contributors put up dozens of posts detailing the related suicides, eyewitness accounts from ordinary citizens translated from Arabic, and tweets that broke news from the ground way before anyone in the mainstream media did. Thanks to the CC license, Global Voices has had its stories republished in The New York Times, Reuters, AlterNet and the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Global Voices is a virtual nonprofit with no office, but its impact is felt in a very real way in myriad locations. “Creative Commons gives us the liberty to facilitate translations into more than a dozen languages daily,” says Solana Larsen, Global Voices’ managing editor. “Whenever we’ve been commissioned to write posts for nonprofit organizations or even mainstream media, we’ve stuck with our CC clause and that has enabled us to republish, translate, and open up conversations to the world.”

Pratham Books

Small Publisher Making a Big Difference / Bangalore & New Delhi

"In a small organization, such as ours, time really is a valuable commodity and in our case, Creative Commons licenses have helped us save time, money and effort."

MORE INFO: http://prathambooks.org

Pratham Books, a small nonprofit book publisher in India, has the simple but ambitious mission of placing a book in every child’s hand. Aware that this was a “huge and audacious goal” impossible to accomplish by itself, Pratham began sharing its books and illustrations under Creative Commons licenses on Flickr and Scribd in 2008. Gautam John, new projects manager at Pratham Books, says, “As a small publisher, we do not have the bandwidth to customize licenses every time a concerned party wants to use our content in a certain manner. What the Creative Commons licenses have allowed us to do is engage with multiple partners without the attendant overhead of legal negotiations and the time and money that it would take for such negotiations to run their course.” Instead, Pratham Books simply sends users a link to the book download and license page, which John says takes them “all of one minute to do.”

Using CC has resulted in a variety of reuses and increased community engagement. “Our communities have created multiple derivative works ranging from iPad and iPhone applications, to porting our works to OLPC (One Laptop per Child) laptops, to creating entirely new books from existing illustrations,” John says. “Organizations and individuals have converted our books to audio books, Braille and DAISY that has allowed the visually impaired access to our content – something that would not have been possible without the Creative Commons licenses. To our mind, all the derivative works were outcomes specifically linked to our Creative Commons license model. Without the Creative Commons license, we would not have engaged with communities because of the internal overhead required to support these multiple efforts.”

This also means increased visibility for Pratham Books, making it easier for the small book publisher to achieve its mission. As more communities reuse Pratham’s content, it matters less whether the organization is directly involved or not. By CC-licensing its work on Flickr and other platforms, Pratham Books ensures access to its books no matter what happens to the organization. “Our books are now hosted in multiple repositories, so they do not depend on our continued existence,” says John. “This allows communities to work on our content and books without needing or having to wait for our approval.”

Pratham Books can concentrate those saved resources on increasing its archive of CC-licensed work, and on its plan to build a new platform for reuse and remix. “In a small organization, such as ours, time really is a valuable commodity and in our case, Creative Commons licenses have helped us save time, money and effort.”

The Power of Open/Text

Contents

Acknowledgements

Credits

Introduction

About Creative Commons

What we provide

Where we're going

Your support

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons Stories

TED Talks

Jonathan Worth

Nina Paley

ProPublica

Yunyu

DJ Vadim

Global Voices

Pratham Books

The Open University

Epic Fu

Bloomsbury Academic

Indaba Music

Curt Smith

Fiat

Vincent Moon

Dan Gillmor

Riot Cinema

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Ficly

IntraHealth

Uncensored Interview

Jamendo

Dublab

Tiago Serra

Al Jazeera

Khan Academy

Human Rights Watch

Arduino

James Patrick Kelly

Robin Sloan

Public Library of Science

Other Voices: Testimonials

What is the Power of Open worth?

How has adoption of Creative Commons grown?

Visualizing the Growth

The Power of Open Supporters

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