Project category: Communities

Initiative:

• GOOD Leaders

Link to web site: 

http://creativecommons.org

Help Creative Commons communicate the importance of its work through several recent successes with the Obama Campaign, Al Jazeera, and Nine Inch Nails. Develop and execute a communications strategy for Creative Commons and these win-win opportunities that exist in between all or nothing. Through improved communication about how CC enables ways to distribute information that benefits society, the creator and consumers, this initiative will catalyze more people to take this information and do it on their own.

Creative Commons, a six-year-old nonprofit organization that promotes the legal sharing and reuse of information and creativity via reasonable approaches to copyright, has achieved several critical successes over the past year. Recent work ranges from projects with the Obama administration (on a plan for licensing third-party content on white house.gov under the most permissive of CC's copyright licenses) to Al Jazeera (on a repository of broadcast-quality video of the war in Gaza that can be used freely by anyone ﾐ including rival news networks) to the rock band Nine Inch Nails (on a copyright licensing strategy that permits fans to shareand remix the group's songs, while also allowing NIN to retain certain exclusive rights ﾐ i.e. the right to make commercial use of its music). The NIN collaboration has provided CC with one of its most compelling stories yet; while all of the songs on the band's most recent album were available for anyone to download for free under the terms of a Creative Commons license, the group made $1.6 million selling deluxe versions of the album in its first week of release alone. Likewise, the album was the #1 bestselling digital album on Amazon for all of 2008, proving that permitting the free sharing of content and profiting financially from that content are not mutually exclusive concepts.