Creative Commons Flourishing in Recession

Ars Technica reports: Creative Commons, one of the most prominent organizations involved in the free culture movement, brought in big bucks through its latest fundraising campaign. The organization met its lofty $500,000 goal despite the current economic downturn.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that was founded in 2001 by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig to encourage copyright reform and provide a legally-sound licensing framework for works that could be freely redistributed. The licenses and file metadata scheme devised by Creative Commons are increasingly popular and have been adopted by a diverse group of artists and writers ranging from the music group Nine Inch Nails to science fiction novelist Charles Stross. In the years since it was founded, Creative Commons has expanded its focus to encompass similar efforts, including a Science Commons project and an open learning initiative.

Lessig stepped down as CEO of the organization earlier this year when he announced plans to shift his focus towards broader political issues. He was replaced by Joi Ito, a Japanese entrepreneur who has close ties with silicon valley startups. Ito has previously served in various governance and advisory roles with the Mozilla Foundation, ICANN, and the Open Source Initiative. Earlier this month when CC was still $12,000 short of its goal, Ito wrote a blog entry encouraging supporters to donate. He also provided some insight into where the money will go in the coming year.

"It has also been a tough year for Creative Commons. It has been particularly challenging for us as corporations and major donors have had to slash, if not completely cut, their philanthropic support. However, we have had more individual and smaller corporate donors than ever in our history," he wrote. "In addition, our project funding has become difficult in many areas and needs more support to survive and any funds past our annual campaign target will go to providing very needed resources."

The international branch of Creative Commons, which adapts the licenses so that they are compatible with laws around the world, hopes to expand its reach to additional countries in 2009. The organization also plans to evaluate the possibility of developing licenses for new fields and different kinds of content. Ito's vision is is far-reaching; he contends that the Creative Commons licensing framework will soon become a "basic layer of interoperability" that will facilitate propagation of content and ideas. In that respect, he believes that the Creative Commons is analogous to the underlying communications protocol of the Internet.

The latest fundraising effort got a big boost from Jonathon Coulton, a popular geek musician who distributes all of his works under Creative Commons licenses. He produced an album comprised of his most popular songs as a promotional hook for Creative Commons donors. Contributors who gave more than $50 received a special USB memory stick with the contents of the album.

"It's hard to overstate the degree to which CC has contributed to my career as a musician," Coulton wrote in a statement. "This is why I've chosen to release a greatest hits album of my Thing-A-Week songs to help support Creative Commons' 2008 campaign."

Coulton's involvement helped draw in a record number of individual donors, but there were many corporate donors, too. Microsoft, which has made significant donations to Creative Commons for the past four years, upped its donation to $15,000 to help the organization reach its goal. Microsoft's involvement in the open source and free culture communities has steadily grown over the past few years. The Redmond giant, which used to be overtly hostile to the notion of copyright reform and freely redistributable content, also became a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation earlier this year.

In addition to the $500,000 raised from various donors during the recent fundraiser, Creative Commons also received a major grant earlier this year from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (William Hewlett was the co-founder of HP) that will partly be used to fund the ccLearn initiative, a Creative Commons project that promotes open learning and the sharing of educational materials.

At this time when the expansion of copyright law is limiting the dissemination of culture by hampering fair use and keeping works out of the public domain, the mission of the Creative Commons is more relevant than ever before. The organization has made a real difference and is beginning to creep into mainstream awareness through its high-profile adopters. The strong support that Creative Commons has received from individual and corporate donors reflects growing recognition of the need for copyright reform and the value of unencumbered sharing.

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