Mike Linksvayer is the Chief Technology Officer for Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.  This is done with the belief that collaboration is a key element of creativity and progress, but that standard copyright is too restrictive for participants throughout the creative process.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses have now been ported into 30 legal jurisdictions around the world and are used in a wide variety of fields, from music to science to art and literature.

CC licenses come in 6 primary varieties with 7 more specialized licenses for things like software and sampling. All are a combination of requirements concerning whether reproduction is allowed, whether attribution to the original creator is required, whether the work can be altered or reused for a profit.

As the CTO of Creative Commons, Mike Linksvayer works to make use of the CC licencing system easier and increase the value of licenced content by making it more discoverable, available and easier to use.

He oversees technical work on internal technologies like the following projects:

• CCMixter, a free audio editing tool.
• CCPublisher, a drag and drop tool for licencing and free hosting of audio and video.
• Collaboration with outside organizations like the Internet Archive (archive.org) and Google's new Creative Commons Search.  (You can search for CC content in Yahoo! as well.)
  
• He's also working on building CC licencing into content management systems.

There are already at least a few hundred thousand CC licenced MP3 files online and the organization is working both to make tools for their use and help taste-makers highlight and promote the best CC audio through media like podcasting. Mike said, for example, that the first CC only music podcast online was Matt May's Staccato. 

I asked Mike how someone in an organization could talk about CC in a way that would help build support for adopting CC licences for their  organization's content. [I think the film that launches when you click on the image to the left is one way to do it!]

He offered the following talking points for encouraging someone to use the CC licence:

 

If you want people to use your content then it's good to show respect for your users. Asking or hoping that people will spread your content without explicitly and clearly giving them the rights to do so is like asking them to do something illegal. CC is not a replacement, but builds on the current copyright system to provide certain rights to users under clearly defined and flexible terms.

 

I asked why it wasn't sufficient for an organization to post a statement on their website telling visitors that they must ask permission before using content, which falls under a restrictive copyrighted by default. These were his thoughts:

• It's not realistic; emails asking for things like that are easy to put off answering.
• Language differences complicate casual conversations regarding legal matters.
• Even in the same language, clear communication is necessary to make content sharing as easy and reliable as possible.
• People will be deterred if that have to ask individual permission, it's harder to do than you might think.
• Put simply, relying on informal communication for matters such as these has a high transaction cost and low effectiveness.

One question that seemed obvious to me as something skeptical people are likely to ask concerns the enforceability of CC. Mike pointed me towards the first court ruling regarding a CC licenced work of art, decided this March in the Netherlands. The defendant, interestingly enough, was none other than former MTV VJ and who is today a key player in the development of podcasting - Adam Curry. The judge upheld Curry's CC license on photos he had uploaded to Flickr and a Dutch gossip magazine had published.

Extending Creative Commons internationally is a key part of the campaign as well. [Click on the graphic to the right to launch a short video on the spread of CC around the world.] Mike told me that there are two steps the organization takes in this process.

The first is to port the basic legal framework into different jurisdictions. There are usually only slight differences to account for, as the basic licences have been written to maximize portability.

CC licences have been ported into 30 different countries to date and are in the process of integration in many others. 

The second stage in spreading CC internationally is building support within local arts communities. Towards this end, Creative Commons organizes CC art shows and summits around the world.

I asked Mike how the adoption of Creative Commons was proceeding and he provided a number of interesting examples.

• CC licences for text were adopted early by bloggers.
• The most common literary genre to embrace CC has been science fiction. This was spurred in large part by the embrace of CC by high profile author Cory Doctorow and the popular Escape Pod science fiction podcast.
  
• A growing number of audio books are now being released under a CC licence.
• The Public Library of Science uses a CC license.
• Even Microsoft uses a CC license for some of its technical specifications regarding RSS.

You can read more about Creative Commons and search for CC licenced content you can enjoy freely at CreativeCommons.org.  The films in this interview are from the CC Mirrors page, where there are others.