What happens when you set your content free with creative commons licensing?

Winner of the Creative Commons 2006 Photo Schwag Contest

I believe in setting my content free.  It provides a huge return on investment.  Here's why:

• A way to crowd source ideas.  People can add and embellish your content and if you have access to the remix, it can give you new ideas
• It creates a gift economy and that help you build your network
• It gets your work out there. My photos and blog posts have traveled around the world!

I use the "BY Attribution" creative commons license.  I've used this license now for four years because it is simple, direct, and easy.   "You are free to use the content, just me credit and/or a link."

Among other reasons, that's why I've been a fan and evangelist for Creative Commons for many years.  I've even taught my children about creative commons (check out Harry's screencast - What A Second Grader Knows About Creative Commons that earned him a feature story in the School Library Association Journal)

All of this assumes that people really bother to look at the license,  understand it, and respect the rules.  I still sometimes see rather blank expressions when I ask about turning to CC licensed resources to find photos.  It turns to surprise when they see what is there and it free for the using.  Or, I get gasps of horror from some colleagues who more concerned about how to "lock up" their content with "all rights" reserved and hire IP lawyers to help them police and protect their work so no one "steals it."

I've always wondered whether or not when someone makes a gazillion dollars on one of my photos or my blog posts, will I be sorry?  No, but is more likely to happen is that people will use the work, use the license honestly, and improve the work. Or, it might open the door for a teachable moment about Creative Commons and the share economy.

Here's a few (good) examples of how I have remixed other people's work or other people have remixed my work.

1.  Remix This Powerpoint.  The powerpoint slides came from a webinar I did a couple years ago for University Extension professionals.  The title was "Ten Steps to Extension 2.0."  The presentation itself is a remix of a remix.  I remixed it from an earlier presentation called Associations 2.0 which was based on Marnie Webb's Ten Ways To Use Web 2.0 to Change The World.  It also incorporates cc licensed materials from others, including videos and flickr photos.

The cover is from a remix mashup that Mike Seyfang and I did a couple years back from a conversation about the least restrictive creative commons licensed.   That photo is one of my most viewed flickr photos and resulted in a number of inquiries for work.

2.  How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media? This was a blog post that I wrote remixing an earlier blog post with the same title from Nina Simon as part of thinking through some of the material for the WeAreMedia project, another open content project.   The illustration is a powerpoint slide that I shared on slideshare.  It's been remixed with and without attribution.  Many do not add more improvements on the idea itself, but rather just cut and paste.   A number of folks have sent back thanks for saving them some time in prepping a presentation.

There was a brilliant example of remix from Morgan Sully who took the idea and remixed it for electronic musicians.  Creating a remix that goes beyond cut and paste, takes some time, creativity and higher thinking skills! 

3. Social Media Game In 2007, David Wilcox and I presented a workshop at LASA using this game he created. I've created a wiki for other people to remix it and it has traveled around the world. We used it for the WeAreMedia workshop and one of the participants, Aids.Gov, remixed a version to train their staff.  I created a version to teach folks about creative commons licensing.

4.  Remixing David Armano's Listen, Learn, and Adapt: I was really inspired by a paper that David Armano wrote for a business audience called Listen, Learn, and Adapt.  I remixed it for nonprofits.  Nancy White picked up on it and blogged it.  Through my remix of the material, I've introduced David's original article to an audience of nonprofits.

When I remix someone else's work, I go to great lengths to give it proper attribution. But, I never know if people who have remixed my work have done so in return.   Now there is an easy way to track it.

Attributor Corporation and Creative Commons have just launched FairShare which is now in public beta.

The press release describes it as:

A free service allowing bloggers and individual content creators to understand how their work is shared across the Web.  FairShare allows anyone creating text content to submit an RSS feed of their work and choose a Creative Commons license to determine how it can be shared. Users then receive license-specific results via RSS with detailed insights into how and where their work is reused.

The FairShare service enters public beta supporting six Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative reuse of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. The FairShare service will be integrated with the Creative Commons license selection process and available in each of the 12 languages that FairShare currently supports.

FairShare helps make the Creative Commons “Sharing Economy” vision a reality by enabling millions to reuse content in a way that provides a value back to the original content creator – value that each creator can define for themselves. 

As you know, I do a fair amount of listening, so when I using monitoring tools I can see exactly who is using my content and in what context. That is if they mentioned my name or linked to me. My goal in using this tool is not to police my content. Rather, I want to see how it is being remixed so I reap the benefits of the Sharing Economy.

Update:  Article in the LA Times

Lucy Bernholz, Foundations Set Your Content Free

How do you feel about setting your content free using creative commons licensing?   What are your concerns?  What are your rewards?  How would you use a tool like fairshare?

Comments

[Mark Dykeman]

I'd say this is particularly good and useful considering that a lot of your work revolves around non-profit organizations. Considering that many of them have small budgets, they can probably use all the tools they can get.

I don't know a whole lot about Fairshare, but now I'm interested in checking it out, so thanks for that.

[risa]

great post thanks, i'm also interested to check out fairshare now. i publish most things i do as cc, which has recently resulted in my totally amateur music being licensed for a french film about india!
in my blogging and when producing these free indie art events we do, i've made extensive use of the CC search i added to my browser's search (in firefox) to find images i can use. a simple trick, but given the context thought i'd pass it on. thanks again!

[bethP]

Hi Beth,

Your ROI points are good ones to keep in mind, and the "remix" terminology reminds me of how musicians exchange ideas and come up with new and better ones by jamming and riffing on each other's ideas. What if McCartney and Lennon had been so concerned with copyright infringement that they'd kept their ideas to themselves? The world would be a different place!

That said, how often do you come across situations where you feel like the CC license has been abused? And how do you respond?

[Marion Conway]

Hi Beth,

I really appreciate your making your material available on Creative Commons and I plan to use some of it in my first workshop on Social Media for Nonprofits later this month. For instance I love your ladder chart - definitely using that.

I think you are right that it is to your benefit to mmake it available as well as to the benefits of the recipients and I really like your idea of a "gift economy." I get calls and emails from people who I help through conversation without trying to engage them as paid clients. I haven't thought about that being part of a "gift economy" but I guess it really is.

I'll be sure to attribute whatever of yours I use to you and I'm sur to generate some new followers.

Marion
marionconwaynonprofitconsultant.blogspot.com

[Liz Allen]

Love this post. We're PLoS and use a CC licence to publish open access high quality scientific and medical research. As a non profit, we use social media (and other techniques) to get the word out and it's a lot of fun. Also, nearly all our sites now have community input via comments and user ratings etc.

[Morgan Sully]

Beth,
this is great. I was so happy to have your starting points as a template for my post! As a non-profit technologist (and as an electronic musician/dj:) the idea of a cut 'n paste culture has been one near and dear to my heart.

A tool like FairShare could make an interesting 'memetic geneology/mapping' tool of sorts. I feel any cultural movement forward (as I think CC can easily posit itself as) is based at least partially on what has come before and a good understanding (or at least acknowledgment) of a legacy before is important to innovating for the future and moving towards a true 'commons' or 'gift economy'.

What good is knowledge (for future generations) if it can't be refined? If everyone just gave a little, wouldn't there be an abundance?

One of my favorite (paraphrased) quotes is "A person without a sense of their heritage is a like a tree without roots". - forgot who said it though. Anyone know?

Perhaps our ideas are always only starting points.

[Beth Kanter]

@BethP - I haven't come across situations where the license has been abused that often. Here's one example:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/12/is_some_big_old.html

I handled it as a teachable moment.

[Beth Kanter]

Morgan: I once has a great conversation with a telecommunications scholar. I asked her how do you feel when people take your ideas or concepts - not necessarily your words - and run with them. She said "I feel great because as a scholar I want my ideas to spread." I guess we both feel the same way.

[Michelle Samplin-Salgado]

Hi Beth,

As you know, all of us at AIDS.gov are big fans, so we were thrilled when Jennie attended WeAreMedia and came back and shared what she learned with our team. We recently did a training at the Office of Minority Health's Leadership Summit and remixed the Social Media Strategy map. It was a HUGE hit. Thanks again for being such a fantastic role model.

Best,
mss

[Beth Kanter]

Thanks for stopping by and sharing that! What did you learn from doing the presentation? What insights did it generate for helping them build a strategy map?

[Alan Levine]

Beth- thanks for twitter tipping me to FairShare. It's an interesting idea, and I am giving it a fair shake, but am a bit underwhelmed... since I rely heavily on my trust network for recommendations, I'll keep an eye on its progress a bit longer than my normal reflex.

Firstly, the re-use of text from my blog posts are among the least interesting content to track. If I was a poet or publishing articles, it might be different. Most of your wonderful remix stories revolve and re-use of media, not text (I did see FairShare has a signup for a future image tool)

I get more indicators from rss feeds of google blog search, lesser so technorati (and I love that social media firehose yahoo pipes app you blogged a while back).

Mostly what I have seen in Fairshare in 2 days is noise. The "re-uses" are a number of aggregator sites (Alltop, AcademicCommons, etc). What I am also seeing are the cases where I create a blog post from flickr (write captions in flickr, then use flickr's publishing tools to push to my blog). FairShare is listing the flickr links as "copies" (which if there was a date check, it would see that the flickr post came first).

The one copy was where someone blockquoted a post and then just added to their post, "Wow".

The stats are interesting and would be of use were I needing to track my written content.

Of course, maybe what I write is not worth copying (that has been my position for a long time).

I am not negative on the idea here, just waiting to see if it produces something more for my possibly edge case. Thanks again for the tip!

[Debra Askanase]

Hi Beth,
Thanks for the "nudge" towards using Creative Commons. I'd been thinking about using it for a while and...I now proudly display it on my website. One of my hesitations was waiting to find out if CC was being widely adopted amongst bloggers. I think there has to be a cultural norm of acceptance for the weight of the imprint to be effective. I agree with Morgan Sully's previous comment about mapping, and think further that it would be an interesting mapping exercise to see who uses it and who those people are creatively.

[Rebecca Krausehardie]

I've been quoting others a bit in my webinars and trainings. How would you like to see yourself credited in those cases? A credit on the slide and a mention in a comment on slidecast?