Celebrating Creative Commons

As a long time supporter of Creative Commons, I was thrilled to get an invitation to the Creative Commons reception last week celebrating Jimmy Wales' joining the board of Creative Commons International.

It was only after a couple years of teaching copyright law to business school students that I fully appreciated the power of what they are doing over at Creative Commons. Since the media lobbyists appear to have a solid hold on Capital Hill, thus making copyright reform pretty unlikely, Creative Commons empowers content creators to very simply make their own content freely available for use by others (in such ways as the content owners see fit). Thus, for example, I am able to make all of the content on VentureBlog available to be copied so long as I am appropriately credited as the source by easily adopting a Creative Commons license.

On the way up to the Creative Commons party I recorded the preamble to my most recent VentureCast. I then caught up with a number of interesting folks -- people like Joi Ito, JD Lasica, Mitch Kapor -- and asked them why they supported Creative Commons. I got a number of interesting answers, some of which I have included in my podcast. Give it a listen and see if you find the zealots at the Creative Commons party convincing. I certainly did.

Comments

[Cardozo Bozo]

CC seems to be a wonderful thing for people who write for pleasure or for ad-supported pages. But what about authors of novels or other works where they are supported only by sales?

I like the idea of reducing Copyright to a contract paradigm instead of a statutory one, but I think there needs to be a contractual commercial license to really attract authorship requiring a serious resource commitment.

[jordy]

What gets me sick is patent law.

[Valerie Thompson]

What do you think of Creative Commons as the basis for distribution of music tracks? A French startup called Jamendo www.jamendo.com is giving it a try. I'd be interested to hear the VC point of view. Thanks, Valerie

[Michael Bannen]

Just a guess here, but I see the following evolution for for social networking:

v2.0: Eye balls and page views (all over again)
- "Does your portfolio have a social networking site?"
- "How many page views do you generate?"

v3.0: What can we sell
- Ran out of VC money
- Need to focus on making some so we can raise more
- Glad Google and PayPal exist

v4.0: Who's going to simplify
- Too many sites
- Too similiar functionality
- Who's going to aggregate and simplify?

Think travel search aggregation (SideStep, TravelZoo)
Think job posting aggregation (SimplyHired, Jobster)

v5.0: Whew.
- Fewer big sites
- Few focused sites
- Now that there's money in it, Google and Microsoft looking to eat our lunch