In an era when content rules, the impulse to expand access to creative works is an idea whose time has been around for at least 20 years. I...
In an era when content rules, the impulse to expand access to creative works is an idea whose time has been around for at least 20 years. It is hard to even imagine today’s maker culture of re-mix and re-use in a proprietary world dominated by copyright.
Early on in 2001, when the Creative Commons (CC/cc) organisation was founded by Lawrence Lessig as a United States-based charity to legally adopt creative licences across jurisdictions, it was a measure of reform to copyright legislation intended to build a healthy digital commons.
The idea was a simple but powerful one: in an age of innovation, creativity thrives through an expansion of access. Just as the copyleft movement sought to allow for the free distribution of intellectual property, creative commons licences arrived in time for a digital era when such re-authorisation was necessary.
In the wake of these legal solutions, the Free and open-source software, Open Educational Resources and Open access movements have soared. Thus far over two billion works are attributed with a Creative Commons licence and the global network allows the discovery of images, audio, video and academic works across platforms (Flickr, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Soundcloud and YouTube) to enable re-use and collaboration. (Just this year, around 500 million images were...
