Creative Commons has been spreading like wild fire, fueling some of the biggest commercial and non-commercial success stories in recent years. An alternative to restrictive copyright licensing, Creative Commons is a free culture idea which grants much more liberal rights for content publishing.

Source: CreativeCommons.org

Is it right for your business? Probably.

Basically, by licensing your published works or content under a Creative Commons license, you are authorizing the great unwashed masses to take your work and re-use it at no cost. Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand comes to life in the marketplace of ideas and you stand to benefit.

Don’t hoard your brand’s messages! Your target audience wants to understand the value proposition of your product or service. The network effect helps achieve critical mass. Give your ideas away on condition of attribution and experience the returns of your minimal investment.

By enabling others to spread your ideas and marketing messages in a manner which benefits themselves, you leverage the networking capabilities of everyone who has interest in your product or service. Rather than keeping your brand’s messaging under tight control as if it were some trade secret, you encourage others to relay information to untold others at no additional cost.

If you’re not familiar with Creative Commons already, you probably want some proof that it actually helps companies make money and enables people to accomplish their goals. No problem.

Case Studies

Flickr embraced Creative Commons and leveraged the network effect to become the premier online destination for photo management and sharing.

Wikipedia harnessed the power of Creative Commons licensing to effectively replace the encyclopedia throughout most developed nations.

Nine Inch Nails, the famous American industrial music band fronted by Trent Reznor, releases full length albums under Creative Commons terms for free download and yet still sold out of their physical CDs in stores across the country, was the best selling album of 2008 at Amazon.com, and stunned naysayers with a special edition CD selling for whopping $300 each which by itself earned $750,000 in just two days alone.

YouTube: Lo que tú Quieras Oír is a Spanish-language film freely distributed and remixed under Creative Commons licensing has garnered over 98 million views on YouTube alone.

Connexions brought college professors together to collaboratively write modern university text books, which have been read tens of millions of times over in just a few years.

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Standford University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago, writes books licensed under Creative Commons terms and made available for free download online while simultaneously available for sale in local bookstores, at Amazon.com, and other venues.

Barack Obama adopted Creative Commons licensing after the 2008 election in order to unleash the power of social networking like the kind which drove his election campaign to success and has continued incorporating Creative Commons licensing where possible in official government venues such as Whitehouse.gov and Recovery.gov sites.

Creative Commons licensing is being used successfully by musicians, designers, scientists, authors, medical doctors, Twitter users, religious ministers, filmmakers, journalists, software developers, political activists, podcasters, animators, and even captains of industry with multi-million dollar net worths.

Additional case studies are available online. Free, of course.

Quo vadis?

So, why have you been using copyright by default your whole life?

Inertia.

You’re not the CEO of some billion-dollar copyright law firm. You grew up with the world around you slapping copyright notices on everything willy nilly. The caveman inside you thinks you’re protecting yourself, when that’s probably not true. Most likely you’re hampering your success.

Let’s take a brief walk back through history, shall we?

Writing and Copying

Written language has existed for six to eight thousand years across the globe with various peoples using writing primarily for documenting mercantile transactions, recording history of the victor, and publishing laws.

For the next few thousand years, copying any written works was a painfully laborious manual process performed by academics of royal courts and sometimes by religious scholars.

About a thousand years ago, the movable type printing was invented by Bi Sheng, who was but a mere commoner and lowly plebeian of Korea. This incredible invention was the basis for the first information revolution as printed works began circulating in relatively large numbers.

Literacy quickly spread among the elite throughout greater Asia. Within a couple hundred years, the famous religious book Jikji was printed as the oldest known metal type book.

Later, in Germany, the entrepreneurial-minded Gutenberg was seeking to increase his income through mass reproduction Christian indulgences. As the business venture grew profitable, Gutenberg borrowed money to fund creation of his mechanical version of the printing press so he could print and sell copies of the now-famous 42-line Bible.

As various people continued to improve upon the printing press, the information revolution swelled to a new crescendo in Europe as literacy and readily-available books became increasingly common, especially among the general masses. Religious turmoil and political upheaval ensued.

Original Copyright

An early form of workers’ unions, the Printers’ Guild organized the influence of printing craftsmen in the courts of Europe. In England, the voice of lucrative business owners in the printing industry were particularly strong. They clamored for legal enforcement of monopoly control of book printing.

And it was granted in 1557. Why? Politicians were scared of losing control over the people.

With publication so easy, all manner of thought was freely circulating amongst the general population. New ideas were percolating which threatened the established order. Naturally, the privileged few reacted by seeking to curtail the rights of citizens and restrict their liberty to read books.

To help accomplish the subjugation of free thought, the free press was outlawed. Search and seizure of private property and persons was the norm. Severe penalties and imprisonment were levied against anyone who attempted to publish a work without explicit authority of the Crown. Books required registration and approval by the Stationer’s Company, the guild of publishing companies who aided the legal clampdown.

Copyright was created to suppress free thought. Plain and simple.

The authority to print a book was restricted to a single print house and carefully regulated. Politicians maintained oligarchy and the monopoly printing presses of collaborators raked in the dough. Scotland broke into open rebellion. Ireland soon followed. And England tumbled into the English Civil War.

Revised Copyright

England eventually turned the concept of copyright on its head in 1709. Proclaiming the goal of copyright should be to foster learning, the new copyrights carefully prescribed limited term protection for author’s to profit from their published works for 14 years before those writings entered the public domain and were made freely available to all citizens to learn from. Additionally, it specifically granted the right of resale to individual holders of a given copy.

For the benefit of society at large, authors were afforded moderate protection in the short term. This ensured that the public could freely obtain published works after a short period of time where the author could seek compensation for their efforts. And anyone owning a copy could sell it to a neighbor.

This was a radical change which was established to benefit the general welfare of the peoples of an entire country, not to protect the profiteering of a few monopolist sycophants whose goal was the restriction of knowledge.

American Copyright

Throughout pre-revolutionary America, ignoring English copyright law was the general common practice. The British were effectively unable to enforce copyright in the wild and woolly new world. Books were reprinted at will to satisfy the demand of colonists.

After the war, the framers of the US Constitution included copyright specifically in the social contract, carefully deliberated how copyright should work, and looked back on the recent past history in England as the basis for their decisions. They, too, decided that the first priority of the government would be to protect the cultural commons and advance the depth of knowledge for society-at-large.

America’s primary purpose in copyright was to ensure freely available information flourished to the benefit of an intelligent people.

To do this, consensus opinion between the founding fathers was to afford American authors of written works a short-term right to control copying within the United States. The idea being the country’s intellectual prowess would depend on being able to reproduce written works without undue regulation while recognizing the benefits granting authors a modicum of temporary protection as a financial incentive for producing more academic works.

If authors were given 14 years within which to make money, it stood to reason they would be very able to make a living without becoming complacent. Limited terms meant authors could not rest on their laurels, but must continue producing new books to maintain an income. This temporary incubation period would effectively put more knowledge and wisdom into the hands of ordinary Americans.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Modern Copyright Abuse

Over a century later, as the power and influence of the robber barons fostered the growth of the federal government, corporate lobbyists were bribing politicians to increase the length of time publishing houses could effectively control the spread of information.

In 1909, long after the Constitution was written, large publishing companies who wanted to rollback the historical clock and increase profits from their lock on knowledge circulation were successful in cajoling the US Congress to double the length of copyright monopoly to 28 years with an option to renew for another 28 years.

54 years of protection. Effectively the equivalent of an adult lifetime. Write one successful book and you’d never have to lift a finger again. For publishers, they would have exclusive right to limit access to information for generations because of they twisted the law to line their own pockets.

Corporate entanglement in US politics only increased over the next decades. Increasingly, legislation became a weapon used to stifle competition as Ayn Rand once feared would be the precise consequence of lazy, incompetent businesses buying political influence to insulate themselves from competition by quashing entrepreneurs via legislation. It’s no more true anywhere than in copyright law.

By 1976, unchecked influence saw Congress again extend monopoly powers to publishers to 75 years. Even longer in special cases.

This radical overhaul resulted in a paradigm shift. Where intellectual property had once been the concept of fleeting protection intended to benefit the general public, the common understanding began to change such that intellectual monopolies were increasingly the accepted social norm.

By 1990, the money of mega-corporations greased the wheels of Congress to approve the Mickey Mouse Protection Act which again expanded the monopoly power of the few to the detriment of the American citizen. So-called because Disney was the primary impetus behind the legislation, buying political influence in order to further their monopoly over cartoon characters created nearly a century before.

The publishing houses of 1600s England would readily recognized the grandiose control given away by politicians, as the length of monopoly extended to 95 years. Enough time to suppress the spread of knowledge for several generations in order to make a few more bucks without doing any substantive work other than wine-and-dine congressmen.

In 1998, history repeated itself when merely being accused of copyright infringement was enough to give publishing companies the right to search and seize property as well as the criminalization of copyright infringement allowing for US citizens to be arrested and jailed. The DMCA clearly reflects the precise laws that contributed to open rebellion in England and from which our Constitution intended to protect Americans against.

In 2005, more of the same expansion of criminalization. Your children are currently subject to 3 years in prison for common activities such as taking a photo at a rock concert using their iPhone, sharing an mp3 file with a friend, or downloading movies online.

All for the profits of lazy people who want to earn money without working for it.

Free Culture

With your right to read currently under threat, various intellectuals interested in preserving America’s tradition of furthering public knowledge coalesced around the Free Culture idea to engender a more sane approach to sharing information in a time of blatant political abuse.

Not all companies benefit from the curmudgeonly restriction of information. In fact, most companies very much stand to gain by competing for mindshare openly. Your company is likely among the great majority who can profit from ensuring more people get to hear your message, not less.

Rather than clamp down on the spread of your ideas, the opposite notion should be appealing. Maximize your messaging exposure by empowering others to spread the word for you. It’s a low cost method extending your reach by participating in the public commons rather than choking to death on some anachronistic copyright monopoly from medieval times.

Opening Up

You give away business cards and brochures. You pay to blast radio spots and TV commercials. You spend hardearned money to develop email lists so you can message recipients.

Why would you stop there? Givers gain.

You can give away your Power Point presentations, encourage your fans to influence their friends, give others the right to spread your Web site content further than you can do on your own, and otherwise unleash the power of your networking skills.

To do this, instead of publishing under the heavy copyright restrictions, you simply choose to publish under Creative Commons licensing terms. People are then empowered to distribute your information to their network so long as they properly credit you as the originator, rather than pass it off as their own work.

Competitors would be loathe to use your information because of the attribution requirement. By using your information, they would expose their own customers to your name as the source of the quality material. It opens their client list to become referrals to your company and lends credibility to your brand.

One size does not fit all. For special needs, there are additional variations in Creative Commons licensing which you can use to find the right balance of freedoms and restrictions you want attached to your work. All of this happens in an internationally standard framework adopted by most modern thought leaders.

Succinctly, if you want more people to hear your ideas and be exposed to your messages, the profit motive should drive you to license works under Creative Commons terms.

Here’s the kicker: Even if you don’t license works under Creative Commons for, whatever reason, you can still profit by using the CC content of other people in your own business. Legally and with their gratitude.

Why?

Because the benefiting content producers understand the value you add to their own bottomline when you distribute the ideas and messages they want to spread.

No matter how you slice it, in all probability, Creative Commons is win-win for your organization.

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