I geek out the future of content licensing with Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons. We talk about why governments probably should avoid using licenses altogether and why social benefit organizations need to open their thinking as they open and share more of their content.

I've wanted to talk to people from Creative Commons for a while just because it's something I'm personally interested in, and also professionally. Would you mind telling us what your title is and a bit about your role in the organization?

Sure. My title's Vice President and it basically means I'm the manager of the core part of Creative Commons. We also have, I guess, by a very long way of describing what I do, a couple of divisions that focus on science and education, called Science Commons and CC Learn, respectively, but I don't manage those parts of it. I work with the core technical infrastructure, culture and other things I guess you'd more typically associate Creative Commons with.

Do you have any insights or experiences from working with governments and public service organizations?

Well, I mean, the U.S. government's a very special case because content created by U.S. government employees is not protected by copyright, or not restricted by copyright if you look at it that way. It's possible that content created by contractors or something could be. But in general, that is one way in which the U.S. Federal government doesn't necessarily apply to any other level of government. It is more open than any other, although everybody in Federal government might not be actually aware of that. So, that's actually something to educate people about that in the U.S. Federal government that Creative Commons licenses are not necessarily relevant or actually should not be used because it would involve asserting copyright over something that is not restricted by copyright. It's already in the public domain.

That's not true any place else in the world that I'm aware of. There is a broader movement, world wide, but in many other jurisdictions, including at the state level in the U.S., there are people, basically advocating for citizens to actually have better access and ability to use and critique, etc. content produced by government. And part of that is just access, it actually being made available online in formats people can use.

And part of it is copyright-related. In cases where the content isn't automatically in a public domain like Federal government employee-created content, the best practice is to use a very liberal CC license, just attribution license to make sure that citizens have maximum ability to access, share and reuse this content, which they've essentially paid for, without any kind of fear of legal problems. Anywhere talking about government produced content, it's really a free speech and democracy issue, I think.

Of course, you have the same kind of issue where you have U.S. Federal government content that might be produced by contractors or something, where it isn't in the public domain, in fact. So, I would encourage, whether it's the U.S. Federal government dealing with contractors or any other level of government under another jurisdiction, not releasing under an open license and a very permissive one. And that seems to be against what a government ought to be doing, which is being open and transparent to its citizens, enabling its citizens to freely use that public information, whether it's for criticism or praise, and be completely certain that what they're doing is completely legal. Otherwise, the wrong people get into power. Then, there's always a threat of free speech problems or problems of lack of free speech.

Now, the one idea that comes to my mind is that citizens might benefit from content or information having at least having some sort of attribution license on there, so that when people are sharing information, they know that it's coming from the government, and that the government can be held accountable for distributing relevant, useful and good information.

Right.

You're the expert here. Does licensing have anything to do with that?

Well, that's a good question. I should emphasize I'm not necessarily an expert. In fact, I'm not a lawyer at all, so none of this is legal advice. Even if I were a lawyer, I couldn't be giving you legal advice, etc. But, that's a very good way of posing the question. I think your question was something like, to rephrase it, does legally mandated attribution have anything to do with this ability for people to track where information came from, just as a basic utility, as opposed to the author wanting credit, which is normally the normal case in the case of a government or a public service institution publishing information. It's good for the citizens to know, and if the organization actually is being transparent, then good for the reputation of the institution or government, whatever it is.

So, the reason that's a good way of phrasing it is because there actually are different parts to it. There's the legally mandated attribution. And a lot of times, people will leap for that. If something is good, why not legally require it? And in fact, for almost all kinds of content, attribution, even legally mandated attribution probably makes sense. In fact, when Creative Commons was launched, we had licenses, which did not require attribution. And we retired them. We didn't bring them to the next version, basically because they were an unnecessary complexity. 98 percent of people wanted to demand attribution. And also in other parts of the world, there are these things called moral rights, and attribution is one of them that you can't necessarily waive.

So, it makes sense to build that in as a default. However, it's always good to be wary of jumping to the conclusion that just because something is good, it ought to be mandated. And so, one of the things we're talking about, particularly in the education and science context, is that it can be better to basically communicate that there's a norm in a certain community of creators that attribution or something akin to attribution is what you need to do professionally, or just to be accepted in this community. But, it doesn't necessarily make sense to have it be legally mandated.

So, the obvious case of this is in science, where citation is the currency of scientific careers, I guess. And if you don't cite correctly, then you're an idiot. That's bad professional ethics, etc. And so, adding in the legal component doesn't, necessarily, add anything. And maybe it might even subtract from those norms. This is a very winding answer, I guess, but one of our new tools that's being driven by use cases in science and education, to a large extent, is a tool called CC Zero, which is going to be a waiver to try to give away as many rights as you possibly can legally in any jurisdiction. Part of that messaging around that is tying together this tool that doesn't legally mandate anything, but the fact that tying, using some technical means, basically, meta data goes with content, saying that you're under no legal obligation, but here are the norms associated with use of this content. So, the obvious one is citation.

Actually, this is also very relevant in the context of public service, in particular, governments, I think. Although there is benefit to the work always being attributed, I think that the desire to have no restriction, in other words, no censorship, should be utmost in people's minds, in dealing with government works. When this tool is available, it would make a lot of sense for situations, where copyright does apply for governments and public service organizations to think about using this tool, basically, giving the public maximum freedom, making it easy for them to cite or attribute, or whatever the term of art is, given the content, but not legally mandating it because a legal mandate is essentially a hammer that could be pulled.

And in some cases, there are free speech issues, and in some cases they're where you expect to be mashing up a whole bunch of content. And scientific research is a good example of this, where you might want to combine databases or whatever you don't want. Scientists have to be worrying about who are the hundreds of people I need to be attributing because they're going to put a citation in the paper that might not comply with what an attribution license might say, but is following the norms of provision. In those kind of cases, you should be thinking about going even more liberal in the Creative Commons attribution license, just going with non-legal norms to encourage people to get the societal benefits of tracking where the work came from.

That's really helpful. I appreciate that because what I'm coming away with from this is basically an understanding that, to repeat what you just said, a legal requirement is kind of like a hammer that we don't want to hang over anybody's heads.

Right.

Whereas, the onus, our responsibility, is to present information in a way that it's clear where it came from, and perhaps provide it in a way that includes links or is embeddable in ways that make it clear that it's officially sanctioned and approved and so forth. However, if people choose to use content without attribution, so be it, but there shouldn't be any penalty to doing that.

Exactly.

Now, with regards to non-profits, what has Creative Commons been doing or what have you witnessed social benefit organizations doing with Creative Commons licenses? How have they benefited from them?

Well, in a sense, the story's not any different from any individual content creator or company using a Creative Commons license. The benefits, there're a combination of social and private benefits, ranging from communicating clearly to your audience what we want them to do with their content. In that case, the license, because it's widely recognized, serves as both this legal tool, this hammer that you can pull if people are doing things that you don't want to do that are outside the scope of the license. And it's also a way of communicating what effectively are the norms around your content, so what you want to encourage.

So, if you're a non-profit, or really any organization, you want to see your message maximally spread, then creating the content out under a CC attribution license, that's the most simple case. So, stick to that for now, it basically says "Use it as long as you give me credit." "I want to see my message spread to the maximum that I can," is the basic "value proposition," to use that entirely bogus phrase. (ed. this made me laugh)

Other ways of putting it, I mean, there are sound byte ways of putting it, like "the greatest threat." This is often put, in terms of artists, but it's also very true for non-profits trying to get their message out. The greatest threat you face is obscurity, not piracy. In the case of a band, there are hundreds of thousands of other bands, probably, who want people to listen to you. And if your goal is to make sure nobody pirates your music that can only work against you competing with those 999,999 other bands.

In the non-profit world, it's very similar. I mean, let's say your non-profit is advocating for lower cost medicines for tropical diseases. Well, there are a bunch of organizations doing that sort of thing. Clearly communicating your particular organization's message, brand, etc., clearly communicating with the content produced by that message, etc., that you want people to share it and even remix it, so on, as they give you a link back, that gives you an advantage over the other 99 organizations in the same field, to put it bluntly.

So, that's the kind of competitive aspect. But, there's also a cooperative aspect to that, especially that might be stronger in the non-profit world than elsewhere, that all of the people in a particular field in a non-profit world are essentially working towards the same thing, making the world a better place. So, enabling that ecosystem to build within itself and reuse content the various non-profits create is a powerful thing, maybe even more powerful than amongst companies and artists where there's, again, a powerful pull to collaborate, but maybe the people aren't fundamentally working towards a common social goal in a sense that non-profits are. So, I think the story's even a little bit stronger.

That said, there's an educational process that we're only part way down the path to. And events/organizations like NetSquared are an important part of that, just educating non-profits about how to take advantage of technology and the culture around technology. And open licensing is just one part of that. Some non-profits can be very conservative for a whole host of reasons, just like any organization can be conservative. And so, that's an ongoing education process that opening licensing is a part of.

Right, it's interesting you mentioned that. The first interview that I did for NetSquared was with a guy named Mark Surman who's been trying to figure out how to open up an entire foundation. It's the Shuttleworth Foundation, so it's founded by Mark Shuttleworth who funded the development of Ubuntu. Anyway, they're embracing all the ideals that make open source software successful and trying to bring that in the non-profit world because there's a lot of sharing that should be taking place.

Yeah, Shuttleworth is definitely a leader in that. Another route to educate non-profits on this is actually through funders. And this has happened in some cases, where the funders realize that, basically, their dollars or Euros or whatever are more leveraged if the non-profits they're giving money to follow open practices. If they're building software, release it under the new GPL. If they're building content, release it under Creative Commons license, etc. The funder dollars go forward, so, therefore, they have a role in educating the non-profit, which works out pretty well.

I mean, as soon as people become aware of the concept, it just makes sense. You mentioned you're barely there, but this is part of your job, is just educating people on this.

Right, we've made a lot of progress, I think. I was at the first NetSquared Conference in 2006, I think, and then, again, in 2008. I observed a significant change over that time period, I think, over two years ago considerably. And there were a number of kind of advocates of open stuff. And Mark Surman was definitely at the 2006 one. So, there were basically a bunch of non-profits who were there, essentially, to figure out how they could leverage technology and other new stuff. And a bunch of advocates of openness. I think in 2006, it was much more the openness people talking, but not really being understood.

In 2008, I think it's now the benefits of being more open, ranging from really concrete things like using a Creative Commons license on a video your organization is producing, to trying to be more transparent and make your data available for mashing up and stuff. That's much more a part of the ether. The questions are more about how do I actually use a license, for example, in this particular context, as opposed to what is this and why is it relevant to me? I think we're definitely on the right path. Again, these are people who are kind of more cutting edge non-profits, I guess, who actually know that they need to get up to speed, and that's why they were at this conference. So, it's a much bigger world out there, obviously, so we have a long way to go.

Any initiatives to get out to those people, the people who aren't already going to NetSquared conferences, things like that?

Well, I mean not just in a non-profit space, but apart from developing the legal and technology underpinnings of Creative Commons licensing, kind of educating the world about Creative Commons and how it can apply in different sectors is what we do, essentially. One of the things I'm most excited about is a case studies project we've started, which we now have 120, I think, case studies, ranging from artists, to companies, to non-profits, etc., looking at how people in organizations have used Creative Commons licensing, what their practices are.

And the idea being that when we talk to a new organization, we can say, "Here's something like you who has successfully used Creative Commons licenses, and you can look at what they've done, follow the example," as opposed to in very theoretical terms, explaining there's copyright and it can restrict what people can do. And we've got the solution called Creative Commons licenses. So, that's kind of an education tool that we're developing that, I think, is going to long-term, greatly increase our effectiveness.

Another really important thing that has large crossover and complement to the non-profit sector is the division we started, called CC Learn, which is specifically about leveraging the license of openness in the education space. And that means a lot of things, including copyright licensing, obviously. The overlap is that a whole lot of the education space is non-profit, so just in terms of interaction and stuff, that part of an organization has probably been the dominant communicator to the non-profit world, simply because so much of its constituency is non-profit over the last year that it's been a part of CC.

Is there anything you want to make clear to NetSquared readers before we sign off?

I think I've covered most of the normal stuff I would talk to the NetSquared audience about, and taking way too long to say it. I would just emphasize that I think a typical NetSquared reader/listener, is with a non-profit that has a very social mission and is looking to leverage technology, and probably open stuff, be an open stuff, open licensing, etc., to further that mission.

I would encourage you to actually do that. Often, people will get cold feet, thinking, "What happens if our message…?" I guess one example of that, "What happens if we do a podcast, for example, talking about providing services to whatever audience you're providing service to, and we put it under an open license and people copy that around. So, not everybody who's listening to that downloads it from our website. That means that we can't count the number of people who listen to our pod cast! Isn't that a horrible thing!?"

To me, that's really narrow thinking here because what is your goal? Is it to get your message out and to have people learn about the good work you're doing and maybe come back and learn about your organization and join, make a contribution, volunteer, whatever? Is it to get the message out or is to get a definite count of how many people are downloading the pod casts from your web server?

So, I'd encourage people to think a little bit. Embracing the open solutions also means thinking a little bit more openly.

And it's difficult because, obviously, the people who worry the most are employees, people who measure their value to the organization based on these kind of clumsy metrics. But, you're right, there's clearly a clash of incentives there that we would all benefit from moving beyond the thinking that restricts our ideas.