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Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation

By Joi Ito

30 October 2009

Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.

In fact, the actual cost of building and launching the first Google server was probably only thousands of dollars using standard PC components, mostly open-source software as the base, and connecting to the Stanford University network, which immediately made the service available, at no additional cost, to everyone else on the Internet.

The explosion of innovation unleashed by the Internet has been driven by an ecosystem of people who work in an open network defined by open standards. That openness has brought us technological marvels like Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia. Now, however, this era of innovation is bumping up against a new barrier. Technology allows us to connect in an increasingly seamless way, but the complicated copyright system originally designed to protect innovation has become a source of friction. Just as we needed open network protocols to create a frictionless online network, we now need open legal standards to resolve the friction that results from outdated copyright restrictions.

The power of open-source, frictionless interaction is clear in the development of the Internet itself. Before Ethernet and RJ45 connectors became the standard, it was usually impossible to connect computers from different companies. While Ethernet wasn’t the “smartest” protocol around, because of its simplicity and the lack of proprietary patents encumbering its use, it became widely adopted as a standard.

Before TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) was developed, even if computers could be connected, they couldn’t really talk to each other without proprietary networking software. TCP/IP enabled the creation of the Internet and ended the era of proprietary networks, including services such as The Source, CompuServe, and AOL in their original forms. Then Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web came along. Many people did not recognize, initially, the value of the interoperability and simplicity of the Web in creating documents on the Internet.

As we know in hindsight, each of these open standards created an explosion of innovation. Ethernet enabled companies such as Cisco and 3Com to emerge and compete in an area that used to be dominated by huge vendors who built superexpensive networking systems designed by telephone companies to specifications hammered out over years in intergovernmental standards bodies. TCP/IP allowed independent companies, the first Internet service providers, to compete in providing network services to companies and individuals, breaking government-granted monopolies held by the telephone companies.

This new competition drove down the cost of moving bits around and enabled a whole ecosystem of software components, many free and open source. Author David Weinberger would later describe this system as “small pieces loosely joined.” The new ecosystem enabled a completely new model, with dramatically lower costs of development, collaboration, and delivery. Suddenly, people could innovate, launch, fail, connect, mash up and remix so efficiently and inexpensively that the center of innovation moved from the research laboratories of giant companies to the start-up and venture capital scene in Silicon Valley.

Now people are using the technology to push collaboration to new levels. As they do so, they’re being slowed downnot by technology but by copyright regulations that are so complicated they require teams of lawyers to sort through. Before the Internet, if two large companies wanted to collaborate on a project or one company wanted to license a work from another company, the deal makers would meet in Paris, New York, or Tokyo to negotiate a price. Once the agreement was struck, lawyers would be flown in to negotiate the contract. Often these were multimillion-dollar deals, with legal fees that added hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of the collaboration. However, the cost of the actual transaction was so high that the legal fees were just absorbed into the cost.

Today, the Internet enables a professor in, say, Croatia to collaborate easily on courseware with a professor in Japan. But while the technology is frictionless, the collaboration faces another hurdle. If these professors are going to share data and copyrighted material legally, they need to clear the licensing systems of both universities, calling upon their respective legal departments. Most likely, they would need to bring in outside experts to translate the legal documents, and finally they would need to negotiate some sort of contract. The legal fees would drastically exceed the technical cost—and indeed the value—of the project, effectively dooming this collaboration to failure.

Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization of which I am the chief executive officer, aims to solve these problems with a series of licenses, technical specifications, and tools that allow creators to mark their works with the permissions that they wish to grant, free of charge. People using Creative Commons licenses decide whether to allow commercial reuse or restrict reuse to only noncommercial purposes. They decide whether to allow the derivative use and modification of their creations. And they decide whether these modified works must be shared with the rest of the world using the same free license. Creative Commons also provides tools for users to dedicate their works to the public domain. For some scientific data or educational resources, the public domain provides the maximum flexibility and value.

You can choose one of the Creative Commons licenses yourself or use the Creative Commons public-domain dedication tool. Service providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft support Creative Commons, providing tools that allow you to mark your works with easily understood icons and standardized metadata. This metadata allows others to find and use available creative works easily, making tasks such as attribution and citation simple and automatic.

The White House, MIT, Wikipedia, Flickr, Al Jazeera, and many other users have generated over 250 million works published under Creative Commons licenses. They do not need to hire a lawyer each time they want to share, because each of these works uses a standard license. People building on the works do not need to ask permission each time they want to share and collaborate, because the necessary permissions have already been granted.

By getting rid of copyright friction, Creative Commons creates an opportunity for completely new types of collaborations and enables previously excluded sectors of society to participate. Projects such as OpenCourseWare and the Open Educational Resources movement allow students and educators to share and build upon each other’s works, dramatically decreasing the overall cost of collaboration and delivery for online learning. Scientists and researchers all over the world are increasingly sharing data outside of traditional academic and corporate silos, enabling collaboration on an unprecedented scale.

TCP/IP and the Web are successful because they are based on open standards shepherded by nonprofit organizations that allow input from a wide variety of stakeholders. Similarly, Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization with thousands of volunteers in over 80 countries working to develop standards for content sharing and helping organizations to adopt these standards. Having 100 Internets or 100 World Wide Webs governed by incompatible standards would suffocate the network effects that we enjoy on our one interoperable Web. Having a single set of copyright licenses and a single metadata format is key to creating the network effect of interoperability at the collaboration level.

In the early days, those of us who were proponents of TCP/IP had to argue with regulators, lawyers, and technologists who, for a variety of reasons, did not support the standard. Creative Commons still has critics who do not yet understand the benefits of the network effects and collaboration that it enables. Like each new layer of the Internet stack, Creative Commons will soon become, in hindsight, an obviously necessary ingredient for collaboration, enabling yet-to-be-imagined innovations that will have a dramatically positive effect on business, society, and the environment.

Comment [13]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

Thank you Joi Ito and Kathy for highlighting the core challenge of the knowledge collaboration conundrum. Sharing knowledge freely and openly accelerates the development of knowledge through innovation based on the exchange of ideas.

But who pays the creative contributors to contribute? I was part of the Australian Digital Economy forums last year and Alan Noble of Google argued strongly that all government controlled public information should be made free on the Internet. I argued if Google controls >85% of all searches for that information where they charge billions of dollars for ads to sit along the search results why should they not pay to contribute to the creation of the public information? Why should the tax payer meet all the expenses of creating the public information and allow Google to gain access to that information free of charge?

It is interesting to watch iPhone users behaviour in paying a couple of dollars for iPhone apps. Companies have already received many millions of dollars because millions of users have downloaded their apps.

Any argument about CC needs to include a discussion on a commercial model that makes economic sense. I think that micropayments are a crucial part of this discussion.

Posted 7 December 2009, 05:24 by Russell Yardley
The Creative Commons licensing system appears to be primarily focused on enabling collaboration and collective knowledge building. I worry that the CC licensing system assumes that all parties (authors and users) understand the underlying legal and ethical issues involving copyright and moreover are ethically and legally complying with the terms of such property ownership and transfer. I’m not confident that the vast majority of copyright owners and for sure users of original work are as knowledgeable of copyright as seems to be assumed.

There is no question that collaborative knowledge-building has had a positive impact on the history of mankind and there is also no question that the originality of individuals has had a positive contribution. It appears that Mr. Ito believes we need to increase the volume of public intellectual property and that copyright has become too powerful and is restricting public knowledge creation and innovation. I don’t share the views that copyright is a major impediment to human collaboration via the web and that public knowledge is severely restricted.

Since 1989, I have worked with teachers and students around the globe and other communities of learners and the number and degree of collaborations and knowledge-building experiences enabled by global networks is staggering. Moreover, the amount of publically available information is overwhelming. People like Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, have made great progress in creating vast digital libraries that are freely available. As a researcher who pre-internet spent countless hours in libraries and a great deal of money traveling to meetings, I can now sit in my home office and with a click of a mouse search through libraries around the world, talk to colleagues around the world, and be exposed to a plethora of ideas and opinions that never would have been possible without global networks. Every day I am a learner in a global university. It is an exciting time to be a knowledge seeker. That being said it is also a perilous time for the original artist.

In the past, the artist had to negotiate with movie studios, recording studios, art galleries, universities, book, magazine, music and software publishers and contracts and licenses usurped some monopolistic powers granted via copyright. We have new entities that in varying degrees are usurping the powers that authors are granted via copyright and the vast majority of authors are totally unaware. In addition, the digitization of content makes copying intellectual property so simple that a chimpanzee can be trained to do it – to click a mouse.

Do we as a society want to ask only authors to give away their work for free for the common good and at the same time allow only technology innovators to use the created original content of others for profit and gain? We’re witnessing massive layoffs of journalists and editors —professional knowledge workers who worked for hire. Maybe that’s fine if knowledge workers are now more productive and so less are needed. But if not, how are we replacing them? At present, we seem to be building a global army of information gatherers and sharers who seem content to work for free and for the common good — our citizen journalist, citizen musicians, citizen playwrights, and citizen artists? In the long term, how do we provide incentive to knowledge contributors? Should we resurrect the WPA? Create a Citizen Creative Corps? Or maybe create an All-Volunteer Army of Artists?

We talk about knowledge-based economies and the information age but do we really understand what information and knowledge are? Do we really know how to value knowledge as a dominant property? What are the new rules for the newly emerging markets —the marketplace of originality, authorship, creative collaboration, and innovation.

Is it fair and ethical for a Search Engine company to scan copyrighted materials without authorization from authors or publishers and to effectively become a monopoly reseller of these scanned books via the Internet? Is it fair for a social networking company to ask authors to grant a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any content posted on their site?

For me, it comes down to this. How do we nurture originality and empower artists in a world where everyone is a knowledge worker and a collaborative knowledge builder?

Posted 20 November 2009, 14:55 by Kathy Rutkowski
Very interesting article and I have to say that I do agree, I have had a look at creative commons previously as I wanted to recommend this to teachers on our website as a resource they could use. Unfortunately I could not find an easy way to search for images that could be used as any results were mixed with non CC images. I would be interested to learn if there are any tools or websites I could use.

Posted 17 November 2009, 12:18 by Kam Yousaf
It is the first time i have heard of this tools, please advice me more

Posted 14 November 2009, 20:33 by MARIA REINA
I have to agree with Ms. Ching’s comments regarding the lack of understanding among the various licenses of Creative Commons. The concept of open source is wonderful, and affords a great deal of diversity as content is created. However, the license structure is confusing and possibly ignored in many parts of the globe. Unless we can institute a way of automatically limiting access depending on the license, we will have obstacles in creating a CC friendly product.

Posted 13 November 2009, 14:22 by Mary Burns Prine
I think that Apple’s business model has shown that people are willing to pay for content as long as it is possible to pick exactly what one wants and price is acceptable in relation to the quality and appeal of the content itself.
Copyright enforcement must be strong, but of course its cost must be commensurate with the price of the content, while plagiarism must be prosecuted with no restraint.
Get-rich-quick models of the past about content aren’t viable anymore: widespread access to the content distribution media (the web) has sent a clear message to authors: lower your expectations and produce something really viable, while it’s much easier than in the past to try and fail spending less.

Posted 13 November 2009, 04:07 by Franco Cavagnaro
The concept of CC is alright however it must run in a place where the copyright regime is clearly understood and enforced. Over here in Asia where I live and work, the awareness of most people to respect creators and not to consume pirated contents are extremely low, and more and more people are treating contents released under CC licenses as simply Free Content they can consume, modify, adapt or discard. They don’t bother to look at the different kinds of CC licenses and what they can do and cannot do with those works.

Posted 13 November 2009, 03:39 by Leslie Ching
Excellent article. Open source aids in the development of innovation. Using the music industry analogously, one can listen on the radio for free or pay a modest $15.00 investment (a CD) and listen to music that one can learn and modify. The notes can be identical but if one changes the strum or cadence they can “design” a totally new tune. This is the basis of innovation and should not be restricted by legal interpretations.

Blatant copy write infringements should be enforced. Stealing from someone else should be a crime. However, these effort should be to enforce theft of existing work, NOT looking to punish artists who attempt to create new work.

Posted 12 November 2009, 21:55 by Robert Martone
What would really strengthen the case is if serious experimental research were conducted to evaluate in quantitative terms the impact that use of CC licenses has on knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Posted 12 November 2009, 16:20 by hasan bakhshi
Completely agree! The next level of innovation includes social innovation, so let’s make sure the nonprofit community (and its research on policy and social issues) isn’t left out of this new area of collaboration!

Posted 12 November 2009, 15:49 by Luise