Creative Commons reaches a Digital Tipping Point

As a producer of "content" and packager of ideas into tangible, reproducible forms (photos, illustrations, animations, video and music), the task of promoting viewership whilst retaining any sort of ownership over said content is daunting at best, boring at the very least. Kind of like that entire sentence.

Hurray for the heros of simplicity in our midst, namely Creative Commons and the evangelists of open source at Digital Tipping Point.

Creative Commons is the brainchild of legal expert Lawrence Lessig, an American law professor and author. A terrific article by Magnatune.com, founder John Buckman, describes the evolution of Lessig's idea in an article for Five Eight magazine:

[Lessig] realized that a large gap exists between Internet Culture and the Legal World. Internet Culture, with its emphasis on sharing, communications, and openness, has produced a variety of wonderful things in recent years, perhaps the greatest explosion of creativity in this century. Lessig's fear was that the Legal World, which doesn't automatically embrace these values, is endangering the future of Internet Culture. He endeavored to bridge Internet Culture and Legal Culture, and the Creative Commons is his creation. The Creative Commons licenses make it easy for creators of new works to support positive values, cheaply and legally, while still retaining rights that the creator wants to retain.

Not only can the creator use the license engine to determine what level of ownership to retain and how interested parties may use the work, but an incredibly creative subset of usage terms that reflect both the world of file sharing and the rise of open source solutions for emerging economies:

• Public Domain
• Developing Nations
• Sampling
• Founder's Copyright
• CC-GNU GPL
• CC-GNU LGPL
• Share Music

Digital Tipping Point

At conference in Cambridge sponsored by Monitor Group titled The Invisible Handshake , I met Christian Einfeldt, lawyer and passionate evangelist for Linux. He joined up with his fellow Miami University alum, Paul Donahue, to embark on a self-described "proof of concept" documentary recording the wide-spread adoption of Linux by artists, technicians, security guards and [gasp!] elected officials.

The film focuses not on computing, but on convergence of social networks with embedded technology.

Intervees include Gilberto Gil, the lively Culture Minister of Brazil, and Christian Ude, Mayor of Munich (who, in a priceless moment of translingual clarity refers to Microsoft "der Marktfueher").

A full list of interviews from the film are available here.