Part 1

The Big Picture

The New World of Digital Commons Paul Stacey

Jonathan Rowe eloquently describes the commons as “the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness and flowing water—all are parts of the commons. So are language and knowledge, sidewalks and public squares, the stories of childhood and the processes of democracy. Some parts of the commons are gifts of nature, others the product of human endeavor. Some are new, such as the Internet; others are as ancient as soil and calligraphy.”1 In Made with Creative Commons, we focus on our current era of digital commons, a commons of human-produced works. This commons cuts across a broad range of areas including cultural heritage, education, research, technology, art, design, literature, entertainment, business, and data. Human-produced works in all these areas are increasingly digital. The Internet is a kind of global, digital commons. The individuals, organizations, and businesses we profile in our case studies use Creative Commons to share their resources online over the Internet. The commons is not just about shared resources, however. It’s also about the social practices and values that manage them. A resource is a noun, but to common—to put the resource into the commons—is a verb.2 The creators, organizations, and businesses we profile are all engaged with commoning. Their use of Creative Commons involves them in the social practice of commoning, managing resources in a collective manner with a community of users.3 Commoning is guided by a set of values and norms that balance the costs and benefits of the enterprise with those of the community. Special regard is given to equitable access, use, and sustainability.

The Commons, the Market, and the State Historically, there have been three ways to manage resources and share wealth: the commons (managed collectively), the state (i.e., the government), and the market—with the last two being the dominant forms today.4 The organizations and businesses in our case studies are unique in the way they participate in the commons while still engaging with the market and/or state. The extent of engagement with market or state varies. Some operate primarily as a commons with minimal or no reliance on the market or state.5 Others are very much a part of the market or state, depending on them for financial sustainability. All operate as hybrids, blending the norms of the commons with those of the market or state. Fig. 1. is a depiction of how an enterprise can have varying levels of engagement with commons, state, and market. Some of our case studies are simply commons and market enterprises with little or no engagement with the state. A depiction of those case studies would show the state sphere as tiny or even absent. Other case studies are primarily market-based with only a small engagement with the commons. A depiction of those case studies would show the market sphere as large and the commons sphere as small. The extent to which an enterprise sees itself as being primarily of one type or another affects the balance of norms by which they operate. All our case studies generate money as a means of livelihood and sustainability. Money is primarily of the market. Finding ways to generate revenue while holding true to the core values of the commons (usually expressed in mission statements) is challenging. To manage interaction and engagement between the commons and the market requires a deft touch, a strong sense of values, and the ability to blend the best of both. The state has an important role to play in fostering the use and adoption of the commons. State programs and funding can deliberately contribute to and build the commons. Beyond money, laws and regulations regarding property, copyright, business, and finance can all be designed to foster the commons.

It’s helpful to understand how the commons, market, and state manage resources differently, and not just for those who consider themselves primarily as a commons. For businesses or governmental organizations who want to engage in and use the commons, knowing how the commons operates will help them understand how best to do so. Participating in and using the commons the same way you do the market or state is not a strategy for success.

The Four Aspects of a Resource As part of her Nobel Prize–winning work, Elinor Ostrom developed a framework for analyzing how natural resources are managed in a commons.6 Her framework considered things like the biophysical characteristics of common resources, the community’s actors and the interactions that take place between them, rules-in-use, and outcomes. That framework has been simplified and generalized to apply to the commons, the market, and the state for this chapter. To compare and contrast the ways in which the commons, market, and state work, let’s consider four aspects of resource management: resource characteristics, the people involved and the process they use, the norms and rules they develop to govern use, and finally actual resource use along with outcomes of that use (see Fig. 2).

Characteristics Resources have particular characteristics or attributes that affect the way they can be used. Some resources are natural; others are human produced. And—significantly for today’s commons—resources can be physical or digital, which affects a resource’s inherent potential. Physical resources exist in limited supply. If I have a physical resource and give it to you, I no longer have it. When a resource is removed and used, the supply becomes scarce or depleted. Scarcity can result in competing rivalry for the resource. Made with Creative Commons enterprises are usually digitally based but some of our case studies also produce resources in physical form. The costs of producing and distributing a physical good usually require them to engage with the market. Physical resources are depletable, exclusive, and rivalrous. Digital resources, on the other hand, are nondepletable, nonexclusive, and nonrivalrous. If I share a digital resource with you, we both have the resource. Giving it to you does not mean I no longer have it. Digital resources can be infinitely stored, copied, and distributed without becoming depleted, and at close to zero cost. Abundance rather than scarcity is an inherent characteristic of digital resources. The nondepletable, nonexclusive, and nonrivalrous nature of digital resources means the rules and norms for managing them can (and ought to) be different from how physical resources are managed. However, this is not always the case. Digital resources are frequently made artificially scarce. Placing digital resources in the commons makes them free and abundant. Our case studies frequently manage hybrid resources, which start out as digital with the possibility of being made into a physical resource. The digital file of a book can be printed on paper and made into a physical book. A computer-rendered design for furniture can be physically manufactured in wood. This conversion from digital to physical invariably has costs. Often the digital resources are managed in a free and open way, but money is charged to convert a digital resource into a physical one. Beyond this idea of physical versus digital, the commons, market, and state conceive of resources differently (see Fig. 3). The market sees resources as private goods—commodities for sale—from which value is extracted. The state sees resources as public goods that provide value to state citizens. The commons sees resources as common goods, providing a common wealth extending beyond state boundaries, to be passed on in undiminished or enhanced form to future generations.

People and processes In the commons, the market, and the state, different people and processes are used to manage resources. The processes used define both who has a say and how a resource is managed. In the state, a government of elected officials is responsible for managing resources on behalf of the public. The citizens who produce and use those resources are not directly involved; instead, that responsibility is given over to the government. State ministries and departments staffed with public servants set budgets, implement programs, and manage resources based on government priorities and procedures. In the market, the people involved are producers, buyers, sellers, and consumers. Businesses act as intermediaries between those who produce resources and those who consume or use them. Market processes seek to extract as much monetary value from resources as possible. In the market, resources are managed as commodities, frequently mass-produced, and sold to consumers on the basis of a cash transaction. In contrast to the state and market, resources in a commons are managed more directly by the people involved.7 Creators of human produced resources can put them in the commons by personal choice. No permission from state or market is required. Anyone can participate in the commons and determine for themselves the extent to which they want to be involved—as a contributor, user, or manager. The people involved include not only those who create and use resources but those affected by outcome of use. Who you are affects your say, actions you can take, and extent of decision making. In the commons, the community as a whole manages the resources. Resources put into the commons using Creative Commons require users to give the original creator credit. Knowing the person behind a resource makes the commons less anonymous and more personal.

Norms and rules The social interactions between people, and the processes used by the state, market, and commons, evolve social norms and rules. These norms and rules define permissions, allocate entitlements, and resolve disputes. State authority is governed by national constitutions. Norms related to priorities and decision making are defined by elected officials and parliamentary procedures. State rules are expressed through policies, regulations, and laws. The state influences the norms and rules of the market and commons through the rules it passes. Market norms are influenced by economics and competition for scarce resources. Market rules follow property, business, and financial laws defined by the state. As with the market, a commons can be influenced by state policies, regulations, and laws. But the norms and rules of a commons are largely defined by the community. They weigh individual costs and benefits against the costs and benefits to the whole community. Consideration is given not just to economic efficiency but also to equity and sustainability.9

Goals The combination of the aspects we’ve discussed so far—the resource’s inherent characteristics, people and processes, and norms and rules—shape how resources are used. Use is also influenced by the different goals the state, market, and commons have. In the market, the focus is on maximizing the utility of a resource. What we pay for the goods we consume is seen as an objective measure of the utility they provide. The goal then becomes maximizing total monetary value in the economy.10 Units consumed translates to sales, revenue, profit, and growth, and these are all ways to measure goals of the market. The state aims to use and manage resources in a way that balances the economy with the social and cultural needs of its citizens. Health care, education, jobs, the environment, transportation, security, heritage, and justice are all facets of a healthy society, and the state applies its resources toward these aims. State goals are reflected in quality of life measures. In the commons, the goal is maximizing access, equity, distribution, participation, innovation, and sustainability. You can measure success by looking at how many people access and use a resource; how users are distributed across gender, income, and location; if a community to extend and enhance the resources is being formed; and if the resources are being used in innovative ways for personal and social good. As hybrid combinations of the commons with the market or state, the success and sustainability of all our case study enterprises depends on their ability to strategically utilize and balance these different aspects of managing resources.

A Short History of the Commons Using the commons to manage resources is part of a long historical continuum. However, in contemporary society, the market and the state dominate the discourse on how resources are best managed. Rarely is the commons even considered as an option. The commons has largely disappeared from consciousness and consideration. There are no news reports or speeches about the commons. But the more than 1.1 billion resources licensed with Creative Commons around the world are indications of a grassroots move toward the commons. The commons is making a resurgence. To understand the resilience of the commons and its current renewal, it’s helpful to know something of its history. For centuries, indigenous people and preindustrialized societies managed resources, including water, food, firewood, irrigation, fish, wild game, and many other things collectively as a commons.11 There was no market, no global economy. The state in the form of rulers influenced the commons but by no means controlled it. Direct social participation in a commons was the primary way in which resources were managed and needs met. (Fig. 4 illustrates the commons in relation to the state and the market.)

This is followed by a long history of the state (a monarchy or ruler) taking over the commons for their own purposes. This is called enclosure of the commons.12 In olden days, “commoners” were evicted from the land, fences and hedges erected, laws passed, and security set up to forbid access.13 Gradually, resources became the property of the state and the state became the primary means by which resources were managed. (See Fig. 5). Holdings of land, water, and game were distributed to ruling family and political appointees. Commoners displaced from the land migrated to cities. With the emergence of the industrial revolution, land and resources became commodities sold to businesses to support production. Monarchies evolved into elected parliaments. Commoners became labourers earning money operating the machinery of industry. Financial, business, and property laws were revised by governments to support markets, growth, and productivity. Over time ready access to market produced goods resulted in a rising standard of living, improved health, and education. Fig. 6 shows how today the market is the primary means by which resources are managed.

However, the world today is going through turbulent times. The benefits of the market have been offset by unequal distribution and overexploitation. Overexploitation was the topic of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science in 1968. Hardin argues that everyone in a commons seeks to maximize personal gain and will continue to do so even when the limits of the commons are reached. The commons is then tragically depleted to the point where it can no longer support anyone. Hardin’s essay became widely accepted as an economic truism and a justification for private property and free markets. However, there is one serious flaw with Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”—it’s fiction. Hardin did not actually study how real commons work. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work studying different commons all around the world. Ostrom’s work shows that natural resource commons can be successfully managed by local communities without any regulation by central authorities or without privatization. Government and privatization are not the only two choices. There is a third way: management by the people, where those that are directly impacted are directly involved. With natural resources, there is a regional locality. The people in the region are the most familiar with the natural resource, have the most direct relationship and history with it, and are therefore best situated to manage it. Ostrom’s approach to the governance of natural resources broke with convention; she recognized the importance of the commons as an alternative to the market or state for solving problems of collective action.14 Hardin failed to consider the actual social dynamic of the commons. His model assumed that people in the commons act autonomously, out of pure self-interest, without interaction or consideration of others. But as Ostrom found, in reality, managing common resources together forms a community and encourages discourse. This naturally generates norms and rules that help people work collectively and ensure a sustainable commons. Paradoxically, while Hardin’s essay is called The Tragedy of the Commons it might more accurately be titled The Tragedy of the Market. Hardin’s story is based on the premise of depletable resources. Economists have focused almost exclusively on scarcity-based markets. Very little is known about how abundance works.15 The emergence of information technology and the Internet has led to an explosion in digital resources and new means of sharing and distribution. Digital resources can never be depleted. An absence of a theory or model for how abundance works, however, has led the market to make digital resources artificially scarce and makes it possible for the usual market norms and rules to be applied. When it comes to use of state funds to create digital goods, however, there is really no justification for artificial scarcity. The norm for state funded digital works should be that they are freely and openly available to the public that paid for them.

The Digital Revolution In the early days of computing, programmers and developers learned from each other by sharing software. In the 1980s, the free-software movement codified this practice of sharing into a set of principles and freedoms:

The freedom to run a software program as you wish, for any purpose. The freedom to study how a software program works (because access to the source code has been freely given), and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.16

These principles and freedoms constitute a set of norms and rules that typify a digital commons. In the late 1990s, to make the sharing of source code and collaboration more appealing to companies, the open-source-software initiative converted these principles into licenses and standards for managing access to and distribution of software. The benefits of open source—such as reliability, scalability, and quality verified by independent peer review—became widely recognized and accepted. Customers liked the way open source gave them control without being locked into a closed, proprietary technology. Free and open-source software also generated a network effect where the value of a product or service increases with the number of people using it.17 The dramatic growth of the Internet itself owes much to the fact that nobody has a proprietary lock on core Internet protocols. While open-source software functions as a commons, many businesses and markets did build up around it. Business models based on the licenses and standards of open-source software evolved alongside organizations that managed software code on principles of abundance rather than scarcity. Eric Raymond’s essay “The Magic Cauldron” does a great job of analyzing the economics and business models associated with open-source software.18 These models can provide examples of sustainable approaches for those Made with Creative Commons. It isn’t just about an abundant availability of digital assets but also about abundance of participation. The growth of personal computing, information technology, and the Internet made it possible for mass participation in producing creative works and distributing them. Photos, books, music, and many other forms of digital content could now be readily created and distributed by almost anyone. Despite this potential for abundance, by default these digital works are governed by copyright laws. Under copyright, a digital work is the property of the creator, and by law others are excluded from accessing and using it without the creator’s permission. But people like to share. One of the ways we define ourselves is by sharing valuable and entertaining content. Doing so grows and nourishes relationships, seeks to change opinions, encourages action, and informs others about who we are and what we care about. Sharing lets us feel more involved with the world.19

The Birth of Creative Commons In 2001, Creative Commons was created as a nonprofit to support all those who wanted to share digital content. A suite of Creative Commons licenses was modeled on those of open-source software but for use with digital content rather than software code. The licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. Creative Commons licenses have a three-layer design. The norms and rules of each license are first expressed in full legal language as used by lawyers. This layer is called the legal code. But since most creators and users are not lawyers, the licenses also have a commons deed, expressing the permissions in plain language, which regular people can read and quickly understand. It acts as a user-friendly interface to the legal-code layer beneath. The third layer is the machine-readable one, making it easy for the Web to know a work is Creative Commons–licensed by expressing permissions in a way that software systems, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand.20 Taken together, these three layers ensure creators, users, and even the Web itself understand the norms and rules associated with digital content in a commons. In 2015, there were over one billion Creative Commons licensed works in a global commons. These works were viewed online 136 billion times. People are using Creative Commons licenses all around the world, in thirty-four languages. These resources include photos, artwork, research articles in journals, educational resources, music and other audio tracks, and videos. Individual artists, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers use Creative Commons, but so do museums, governments, creative industries, manufacturers, and publishers. Millions of websites use CC licenses, including major platforms like Wikipedia and Flickr and smaller ones like blogs.21 Users of Creative Commons are diverse and cut across many different sectors. (Our case studies were chosen to reflect that diversity.) Some see Creative Commons as a way to share a gift with others, a way of getting known, or a way to provide social benefit. Others are simply committed to the norms associated with a commons. And for some, participation has been spurred by the free-culture movement, a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works. The free-culture movement sees a commons as providing significant benefits compared to restrictive copyright laws. This ethos of free exchange in a commons aligns the free-culture movement with the free and open-source software movement. Over time, Creative Commons has spawned a range of open movements, including open educational resources, open access, open science, and open data. The goal in every case has been to democratize participation and share digital resources at no cost, with legal permissions for anyone to freely access, use, and modify. The state is increasingly involved in supporting open movements. The Open Government Partnership was launched in 2011 to provide an international platform for governments to become more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Since then, it has grown from eight participating countries to seventy.22 In all these countries, government and civil society are working together to develop and implement ambitious open-government reforms. Governments are increasingly adopting Creative Commons to ensure works funded with taxpayer dollars are open and free to the public that paid for them.

The Changing Market Today’s market is largely driven by global capitalism. Law and financial systems are structured to support extraction, privatization, and corporate growth. A perception that the market is more efficient than the state has led to continual privatization of many public natural resources, utilities, services, and infrastructures.23 While this system has been highly efficient at generating consumerism and the growth of gross domestic product, the impact on human well-being has been mixed. Offsetting rising living standards and improvements to health and education are ever-increasing wealth inequality, social inequality, poverty, deterioration of our natural environment, and breakdowns of democracy.24 In light of these challenges there is a growing recognition that GDP growth should not be an end in itself, that development needs to be socially and economically inclusive, that environmental sustainability is a requirement not an option, and that we need to better balance the market, state and community.25 These realizations have led to a resurgence of interest in the commons as a means of enabling that balance. City governments like Bologna, Italy, are collaborating with their citizens to put in place regulations for the care and regeneration of urban commons.26 Seoul and Amsterdam call themselves “sharing cities,” looking to make sustainable and more efficient use of scarce resources. They see sharing as a way to improve the use of public spaces, mobility, social cohesion, and safety.27 The market itself has taken an interest in the sharing economy, with businesses like Airbnb providing a peer-to-peer marketplace for short-term lodging and Uber providing a platform for ride sharing. However, Airbnb and Uber are still largely operating under the usual norms and rules of the market, making them less like a commons and more like a traditional business seeking financial gain. Much of the sharing economy is not about the commons or building an alternative to a corporate-driven market economy; it’s about extending the deregulated free market into new areas of our lives.28 While none of the people we interviewed for our case studies would describe themselves as part of the sharing economy, there are in fact some significant parallels. Both the sharing economy and the commons make better use of asset capacity. The sharing economy sees personal residents and cars as having latent spare capacity with rental value. The equitable access of the commons broadens and diversifies the number of people who can use and derive value from an asset. One way Made with Creative Commons case studies differ from those of the sharing economy is their focus on digital resources. Digital resources function under different economic rules than physical ones. In a world where prices always seem to go up, information technology is an anomaly. Computer-processing power, storage, and bandwidth are all rapidly increasing, but rather than costs going up, costs are coming down. Digital technologies are getting faster, better, and cheaper. The cost of anything built on these technologies will always go down until it is close to zero.29 Those that are Made with Creative Commons are looking to leverage the unique inherent characteristics of digital resources, including lowering costs. The use of digital-rights-management technologies in the form of locks, passwords, and controls to prevent digital goods from being accessed, changed, replicated, and distributed is minimal or nonexistent. Instead, Creative Commons licenses are used to put digital content out in the commons, taking advantage of the unique economics associated with being digital. The aim is to see digital resources used as widely and by as many people as possible. Maximizing access and participation is a common goal. They aim for abundance over scarcity. The incremental cost of storing, copying, and distributing digital goods is next to zero, making abundance possible. But imagining a market based on abundance rather than scarcity is so alien to the way we conceive of economic theory and practice that we struggle to do so.30 Those that are Made with Creative Commons are each pioneering in this new landscape, devising their own economic models and practice. Some are looking to minimize their interactions with the market and operate as autonomously as possible. Others are operating largely as a business within the existing rules and norms of the market. And still others are looking to change the norms and rules by which the market operates. For an ordinary corporation, making social benefit a part of its operations is difficult, as it’s legally required to make decisions that financially benefit stockholders. But new forms of business are emerging. There are benefit corporations and social enterprises, which broaden their business goals from making a profit to making a positive impact on society, workers, the community, and the environment.31 Community-owned businesses, worker-owned businesses, cooperatives, guilds, and other organizational forms offer alternatives to the traditional corporation. Collectively, these alternative market entities are changing the rules and norms of the market.32 “A book on open business models” is how we described it in this book’s Kickstarter campaign. We used a handbook called Business Model Generation as our reference for defining just what a business model is. Developed over nine years using an “open process” involving 470 coauthors from forty-five countries, it is useful as a framework for talking about business models.33 It contains a “business model canvas,” which conceives of a business model as having nine building blocks.34 This blank canvas can serve as a tool for anyone to design their own business model. We remixed this business model canvas into an open business model canvas, adding three more building blocks relevant to hybrid market, commons enterprises: social good, Creative Commons license, and “type of open environment that the business fits in.”35 This enhanced canvas proved useful when we analyzed businesses and helped start-ups plan their economic model. In our case study interviews, many expressed discomfort over describing themselves as an open business model—the term business model suggested primarily being situated in the market. Where you sit on the commons-to-market spectrum affects the extent to which you see yourself as a business in the market. The more central to the mission shared resources and commons values are, the less comfort there is in describing yourself, or depicting what you do, as a business. Not all who have endeavors Made with Creative Commons use business speak; for some the process has been experimental, emergent, and organic rather than carefully planned using a predefined model. The creators, businesses, and organizations we profile all engage with the market to generate revenue in some way. The ways in which this is done vary widely. Donations, pay what you can, memberships, “digital for free but physical for a fee,” crowdfunding, matchmaking, value-add services, patrons . . . the list goes on and on. (Initial description of how to earn revenue available through reference note. For latest thinking see How to Bring In Money in the next section.) 36 There is no single magic bullet, and each endeavor has devised ways that work for them. Most make use of more than one way. Diversifying revenue streams lowers risk and provides multiple paths to sustainability.

Benefits of the Digital Commons While it may be clear why commons-based organizations want to interact and engage with the market (they need money to survive), it may be less obvious why the market would engage with the commons. The digital commons offers many benefits. The commons speeds dissemination. The free flow of resources in the commons offers tremendous economies of scale. Distribution is decentralized, with all those in the commons empowered to share the resources they have access to. Those that are Made with Creative Commons have a reduced need for sales or marketing. Decentralized distribution amplifies supply and know-how. The commons ensures access to all. The market has traditionally operated by putting resources behind a paywall requiring payment first before access. The commons puts resources in the open, providing access up front without payment. Those that are Made with Creative Commons make little or no use of digital rights management (DRM) to manage resources. Not using DRM frees them of the costs of acquiring DRM technology and staff resources to engage in the punitive practices associated with restricting access. The way the commons provides access to everyone levels the playing field and promotes inclusiveness, equity, and fairness. The commons maximizes participation. Resources in the commons can be used and contributed to by everyone. Using the resources of others, contributing your own, and mixing yours with others to create new works are all dynamic forms of participation made possible by the commons. Being Made with Creative Commons means you’re engaging as many users with your resources as possible. Users are also authoring, editing, remixing, curating, localizing, translating, and distributing. The commons makes it possible for people to directly participate in culture, knowledge building, and even democracy, and many other socially beneficial practices. The commons spurs innovation. Resources in the hands of more people who can use them leads to new ideas. The way commons resources can be modified, customized, and improved results in derivative works never imagined by the original creator. Some endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons deliberately encourage users to take the resources being shared and innovate them. Doing so moves research and development (R&D) from being solely inside the organization to being in the community.37 Community-based innovation will keep an organization or business on its toes. It must continue to contribute new ideas, absorb and build on top of the innovations of others, and steward the resources and the relationship with the community. The commons boosts reach and impact. The digital commons is global. Resources may be created for a local or regional need, but they go far and wide generating a global impact. In the digital world, there are no borders between countries. When you are Made with Creative Commons, you are often local and global at the same time: Digital designs being globally distributed but made and manufactured locally. Digital books or music being globally distributed but readings and concerts performed locally. The digital commons magnifies impact by connecting creators to those who use and build on their work both locally and globally. The commons is generative. Instead of extracting value, the commons adds value. Digitized resources persist without becoming depleted, and through use are improved, personalized, and localized. Each use adds value. The market focuses on generating value for the business and the customer. The commons generates value for a broader range of beneficiaries including the business, the customer, the creator, the public, and the commons itself. The generative nature of the commons means that it is more cost-effective and produces a greater return on investment. Value is not just measured in financial terms. Each new resource added to the commons provides value to the public and contributes to the overall value of the commons. The commons brings people together for a common cause. The commons vests people directly with the responsibility to manage the resources for the common good. The costs and benefits for the individual are balanced with the costs and benefits for the community and for future generations. Resources are not anonymous or mass produced. Their provenance is known and acknowledged through attribution and other means. Those that are Made with Creative Commons generate awareness and reputation based on their contributions to the commons. The reach, impact, and sustainability of those contributions rest largely on their ability to forge relationships and connections with those who use and improve them. By functioning on the basis of social engagement, not monetary exchange, the commons unifies people. The benefits of the commons are many. When these benefits align with the goals of individuals, communities, businesses in the market, or state enterprises, choosing to manage resources as a commons ought to be the option of choice.

Our Case Studies The creators, organizations, and businesses in our case studies operate as nonprofits, for-profits, and social enterprises. Regardless of legal status, they all have a social mission. Their primary reason for being is to make the world a better place, not to profit. Money is a means to a social end, not the end itself. They factor public interest into decisions, behavior, and practices. Transparency and trust are really important. Impact and success are measured against social aims expressed in mission statements, and are not just about the financial bottom line. The case studies are based on the narratives told to us by founders and key staff. Instead of solely using financials as the measure of success and sustainability, they emphasized their mission, practices, and means by which they measure success. Metrics of success are a blend of how social goals are being met and how sustainable the enterprise is. Our case studies are diverse, ranging from publishing to education and manufacturing. All of the organizations, businesses, and creators in the case studies produce digital resources. Those resources exist in many forms including books, designs, songs, research, data, cultural works, education materials, graphic icons, and video. Some are digital representations of physical resources. Others are born digital but can be made into physical resources. They are creating new resources, or using the resources of others, or mixing existing resources together to make something new. They, and their audience, all play a direct, participatory role in managing those resources, including their preservation, curation, distribution, and enhancement. Access and participation is open to all regardless of monetary means. And as users of Creative Commons licenses, they are automatically part of a global community. The new digital commons is global. Those we profiled come from nearly every continent in the world. To build and interact within this global community is conducive to success. Creative Commons licenses may express legal rules around the use of resources in a commons, but success in the commons requires more than following the letter of the law and acquiring financial means. Over and over we heard in our interviews how success and sustainability are tied to a set of beliefs, values, and principles that underlie their actions: Give more than you take. Be open and inclusive. Add value. Make visible what you are using from the commons, what you are adding, and what you are monetizing. Maximize abundance. Give attribution. Express gratitude. Develop trust; don’t exploit. Build relationship and community. Be transparent. Defend the commons. The new digital commons is here to stay. Made With Creative Commons case studies show how it’s possible to be part of this commons while still functioning within market and state systems. The commons generates benefits neither the market nor state can achieve on their own. Rather than the market or state dominating as primary means of resource management, a more balanced alternative is possible. Enterprise use of Creative Commons has only just begun. The case studies in this book are merely starting points. Each is changing and evolving over time. Many more are joining and inventing new models. This overview aims to provide a framework and language for thinking and talking about the new digital commons. The remaining sections go deeper providing further guidance and insights on how it works.

Notes Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013), 14. David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 176. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 175. Daniel H. Cole, “Learning from Lin: Lessons and Cautions from the Natural Commons for the Knowledge Commons,” in Governing Knowledge Commons, eds. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J. Strandburg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (New York: Zed Books, 2014), 93. Cole, “Learning from Lin,” in Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg, Governing Knowledge Commons, 59. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 175. Joshua Farley and Ida Kubiszewski, “The Economics of Information in a Post-Carbon Economy,” in Free Knowledge: Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery, eds. Patricia W. Elliott and Daryl H. Hepting (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2015), 201–4. Rowe, Our Common Wealth, 19; and Heather Menzies, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 42–43. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 55–78. Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2015), 46–57; and Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 88. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J. Strandburg, “Governing Knowledge Commons,” in Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg Governing Knowledge Commons, 12. Farley and Kubiszewski, “Economics of Information,” in Elliott and Hepting, Free Knowledge, 203. “What Is Free Software?” GNU Operating System, the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab, accessed December 30, 2016, www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw. Wikipedia, s.v. “Open-source software,” last modified November 22, 2016. Eric S. Raymond, “The Magic Cauldron,” in The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, rev. ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001), www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. New York Times Customer Insight Group, The Psychology of Sharing: Why Do People Share Online? (New York: New York Times Customer Insight Group, 2011), www.iab.net/media/file/POSWhitePaper.pdf. “Licensing Considerations,” Creative Commons, accessed December 30, 2016, creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/. Creative Commons, 2015 State of the Commons (Mountain View, CA: Creative Commons, 2015), stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/. Wikipedia, s.v. “Open Government Partnership,” last modified September 24, 2016, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Partnership. Capra and Mattei, Ecology of Law, 114. Ibid., 116. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, “Stockholm Statement” accessed February 15, 2017, sida.se/globalassets/sida/eng/press/stockholm-statement.pdf City of Bologna, Regulation on Collaboration between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, trans. LabGov (LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons) (Bologna, Italy: City of Bologna, 2014), www.labgov.it/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/Bologna-Regulation-on-collaboration-between-citizens-and-the-city-for-the-cure-and-regeneration-of-urban-commons1.pdf. The Seoul Sharing City website is english.sharehub.kr; for Amsterdam Sharing City, go to www.sharenl.nl/amsterdam-sharing-city/. Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (New York: OR Books, 2015), 42. Chris Anderson, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, Reprint with new preface. (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 78. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 273. Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution: Democratizing Wealth and Building a Community-Sustaining Economy from the Ground Up (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2013), 39. Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution; Journeys to a Generative Economy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2012), 8–9. Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010). A preview of the book is available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation. This business model canvas is available to download at strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas. We’ve made the “Open Business Model Canvas,” designed by the coauthor Paul Stacey, available online at docs.google.com/drawings/d/1QOIDa2qak7wZSSOa4Wv6qVMO77IwkKHN7CYyq0wHivs/edit. You can also find the accompanying Open Business Model Canvas Questions at docs.google.com/drawings/d/1kACK7TkoJgsM18HUWCbX9xuQ0Byna4plSVZXZGTtays/edit. A more comprehensive list of revenue streams is available in this post I wrote on Medium on March 6, 2016. “What Is an Open Business Model and How Can You Generate Revenue?”, available at medium.com/made-with-creative-commons/what-is-an-open-business-model-and-how-can-you-generate-revenue-5854d2659b15. Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006), 31–44.

How to Be Made with Creative Commons Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

When we began this project in August 2015, we set out to write a book about business models that involve Creative Commons licenses in some significant way—what we call being Made with Creative Commons. With the help of our Kickstarter backers, we chose twenty-four endeavors from all around the world that are Made with Creative Commons. The mix is diverse, from an individual musician to a university-textbook publisher to an electronics manufacturer. Some make their own content and share under Creative Commons licensing. Others are platforms for CC-licensed creative work made by others. Many sit somewhere in between, both using and contributing creative work that’s shared with the public. Like all who use the licenses, these endeavors share their work—whether it’s open data or furniture designs—in a way that enables the public not only to access it but also to make use of it. We analyzed the revenue models, customer segments, and value propositions of each endeavor. We searched for ways that putting their content under Creative Commons licenses helped boost sales or increase reach. Using traditional measures of economic success, we tried to map these business models in a way that meaningfully incorporated the impact of Creative Commons. In our interviews, we dug into the motivations, the role of CC licenses, modes of revenue generation, definitions of success. In fairly short order, we realized the book we set out to write was quite different from the one that was revealing itself in our interviews and research. It isn’t that we were wrong to think you can make money while using Creative Commons licenses. In many instances, CC can help make you more money. Nor were we wrong that there are business models out there that others who want to use CC licensing as part of their livelihood or business could replicate. What we didn’t realize was just how misguided it would be to write a book about being Made with Creative Commons using only a business lens. According to the seminal handbook Business Model Generation, a business model “describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”1 Thinking about sharing in terms of creating and capturing value always felt inappropriately transactional and out of place, something we heard time and time again in our interviews. And as Cory Doctorow told us in our interview with him, “Business model can mean anything you want it to mean.” Eventually, we got it. Being Made with Creative Commons is more than a business model. While we will talk about specific revenue models as one piece of our analysis (and in more detail in the case studies), we scrapped that as our guiding rubric for the book. Admittedly, it took me a long time to get there. When Paul and I divided up our writing after finishing the research, my charge was to distill everything we learned from the case studies and write up the practical lessons and takeaways. I spent months trying to jam what we learned into the business-model box, convinced there must be some formula for the way things interacted. But there is no formula. You’ll probably have to discard that way of thinking before you read any further.

In every interview, we started from the same simple questions. Amid all the diversity among the creators, organizations, and businesses we profiled, there was one constant. Being Made with Creative Commons may be good for business, but that is not why they do it. Sharing work with Creative Commons is, at its core, a moral decision. The commercial and other self-interested benefits are secondary. Most decided to use CC licenses first and found a revenue model later. This was our first hint that writing a book solely about the impact of sharing on business might be a little off track. But we also started to realize something about what it means to be Made with Creative Commons. When people talked to us about how and why they used CC, it was clear that it meant something more than using a copyright license. It also represented a set of values. There is symbolism behind using CC, and that symbolism has many layers. At one level, being Made with Creative Commons expresses an affinity for the value of Creative Commons. While there are many different flavors of CC licenses and nearly infinite ways to be Made with Creative Commons, the basic value system is rooted in a fundamental belief that knowledge and creativity are building blocks of our culture rather than just commodities from which to extract market value. These values reflect a belief that the common good should always be part of the equation when we determine how to regulate our cultural outputs. They reflect a belief that everyone has something to contribute, and that no one can own our shared culture. They reflect a belief in the promise of sharing. Whether the public makes use of the opportunity to copy and adapt your work, sharing with a Creative Commons license is a symbol of how you want to interact with the people who consume your work. Whenever you create something, “all rights reserved” under copyright is automatic, so the copyright symbol (©) on the work does not necessarily come across as a marker of distrust or excessive protectionism. But using a CC license can be a symbol of the opposite—of wanting a real human relationship, rather than an impersonal market transaction. It leaves open the possibility of connection. Being Made with Creative Commons not only demonstrates values connected to CC and sharing. It also demonstrates that something other than profit drives what you do. In our interviews, we always asked what success looked like for them. It was stunning how rarely money was mentioned. Most have a deeper purpose and a different vision of success. The driving motivation varies depending on the type of endeavor. For individual creators, it is most often about personal inspiration. In some ways, this is nothing new. As Doctorow has written, “Creators usually start doing what they do for love.”2 But when you share your creative work under a CC license, that dynamic is even more pronounced. Similarly, for technological innovators, it is often less about creating a specific new thing that will make you rich and more about solving a specific problem you have. The creators of Arduino told us that the key question when creating something is “Do you as the creator want to use it? It has to have personal use and meaning.” Many that are Made with Creative Commons have an express social mission that underpins everything they do. In many cases, sharing with Creative Commons expressly advances that social mission, and using the licenses can be the difference between legitimacy and hypocrisy. Noun Project co-founder Edward Boatman told us they could not have stated their social mission of sharing with a straight face if they weren’t willing to show the world that it was OK to share their content using a Creative Commons license. This dynamic is probably one reason why there are so many nonprofit examples of being Made with Creative Commons. The content is the result of a labor of love or a tool to drive social change, and money is like gas in the car, something that you need to keep going but not an end in itself. Being Made with Creative Commons is a different vision of a business or livelihood, where profit is not paramount, and producing social good and human connection are integral to success.

Even if profit isn’t the end goal, you have to bring in money to be successfully Made with Creative Commons. At a bare minimum, you have to make enough money to keep the lights on. The costs of doing business vary widely for those made with CC, but there is generally a much lower threshold for sustainability than there used to be for any creative endeavor. Digital technology has made it easier than ever to create, and easier than ever to distribute. As Doctorow put it in his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, “If analog dollars have turned into digital dimes (as the critics of ad-supported media have it), there is the fact that it’s possible to run a business that gets the same amount of advertising as its forebears at a fraction of the price.” Some creation costs are the same as they always were. It takes the same amount of time and money to write a peer-reviewed journal article or paint a painting. Technology can’t change that. But other costs are dramatically reduced by technology, particularly in production-heavy domains like filmmaking.3 CC-licensed content and content in the public domain, as well as the work of volunteer collaborators, can also dramatically reduce costs if they’re being used as resources to create something new. And, of course, there is the reality that some content would be created whether or not the creator is paid because it is a labor of love. Distributing content is almost universally cheaper than ever. Once content is created, the costs to distribute copies digitally are essentially zero.4 The costs to distribute physical copies are still significant, but lower than they have been historically. And it is now much easier to print and distribute physical copies on-demand, which also reduces costs. Depending on the endeavor, there can be a whole host of other possible expenses like marketing and promotion, and even expenses associated with the various ways money is being made, like touring or custom training. It’s important to recognize that the biggest impact of technology on creative endeavors is that creators can now foot the costs of creation and distribution themselves. People now often have a direct route to their potential public without necessarily needing intermediaries like record labels and book publishers. Doctorow wrote, “If you’re a creator who never got the time of day from one of the great imperial powers, this is your time. Where once you had no means of reaching an audience without the assistance of the industry-dominating megacompanies, now you have hundreds of ways to do it without them.”5 Previously, distribution of creative work involved the costs associated with sustaining a monolithic entity, now creators can do the work themselves. That means the financial needs of creative endeavors can be a lot more modest. Whether for an individual creator or a larger endeavor, it usually isn’t enough to break even if you want to make what you’re doing a livelihood. You need to build in some support for the general operation. This extra bit looks different for everyone, but importantly, in nearly all cases for those Made with Creative Commons, the definition of “enough money” looks a lot different than it does in the world of venture capital and stock options. It is more about sustainability and less about unlimited growth and profit. SparkFun founder Nathan Seidle told us, “Business model is a really grandiose word for it. It is really just about keeping the operation going day to day.”

This book is a testament to the notion that it is possible to make money while using CC licenses and CC-licensed content, but we are still very much at an experimental stage. The creators, organizations, and businesses we profile in this book are blazing the trail and adapting in real time as they pursue this new way of operating. There are, however, plenty of ways in which CC licensing can be good for business in fairly predictable ways. The first is how it helps solve “problem zero.”

Problem Zero: Getting Discovered Once you create or collect your content, the next step is finding users, customers, fans—in other words, your people. As Amanda Palmer wrote, “It has to start with the art. The songs had to touch people initially, and mean something, for anything to work at all.”6 There isn’t any magic to finding your people, and there is certainly no formula. Your work has to connect with people and offer them some artistic and/or utilitarian value. In some ways, this is easier than ever. Online we are not limited by shelf space, so there is room for every obscure interest, taste, and need imaginable. This is what Chris Anderson dubbed the Long Tail, where consumption becomes less about mainstream mass “hits” and more about micromarkets for every particular niche. As Anderson wrote, “We are all different, with different wants and needs, and the Internet now has a place for all of them in the way that physical markets did not.”7 We are no longer limited to what appeals to the masses. While finding “your people” online is theoretically easier than in the analog world, as a practical matter it can still be difficult to actually get noticed. The Internet is a firehose of content, one that only grows larger by the minute. As a content creator, not only are you competing for attention against more content creators than ever before, you are competing against creativity generated outside the market as well.8 Anderson wrote, “The greatest change of the past decade has been the shift in time people spend consuming amateur content instead of professional content.”9 To top it all off, you have to compete against the rest of their lives, too—“friends, family, music playlists, soccer games, and nights on the town.”10 Somehow, some way, you have to get noticed by the right people. When you come to the Internet armed with an all-rights-reserved mentality from the start, you are often restricting access to your work before there is even any demand for it. In many cases, requiring payment for your work is part of the traditional copyright system. Even a tiny cost has a big effect on demand. It’s called the penny gap—the large difference in demand between something that is available at the price of one cent versus the price of zero.11 That doesn’t mean it is wrong to charge money for your content. It simply means you need to recognize the effect that doing so will have on demand. The same principle applies to restricting access to copy the work. If your problem is how to get discovered and find “your people,” prohibiting people from copying your work and sharing it with others is counterproductive. Of course, it’s not that being discovered by people who like your work will make you rich—far from it. But as Cory Doctorow says, “Recognition is one of many necessary preconditions for artistic success.”12 Choosing not to spend time and energy restricting access to your work and policing infringement also builds goodwill. Lumen Learning, a for-profit company that publishes online educational materials, made an early decision not to prevent students from accessing their content, even in the form of a tiny paywall, because it would negatively impact student success in a way that would undermine the social mission behind what they do. They believe this decision has generated an immense amount of goodwill within the community. It is not just that restricting access to your work may undermine your social mission. It also may alienate the people who most value your creative work. If people like your work, their natural instinct will be to share it with others. But as David Bollier wrote, “Our natural human impulses to imitate and share—the essence of culture—have been criminalized.”13 The fact that copying can carry criminal penalties undoubtedly deters copying it, but copying with the click of a button is too easy and convenient to ever fully stop it. Try as the copyright industry might to persuade us otherwise, copying a copyrighted work just doesn’t feel like stealing a loaf of bread. And, of course, that’s because it isn’t. Sharing a creative work has no impact on anyone else’s ability to make use of it. If you take some amount of copying and sharing your work as a given, you can invest your time and resources elsewhere, rather than wasting them on playing a cat and mouse game with people who want to copy and share your work. Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmuseum said, “We could spend a lot of money trying to protect works, but people are going to do it anyway. And they will use bad-quality versions.” Instead, they started releasing high-resolution digital copies of their collection into the public domain and making them available for free on their website. For them, sharing was a form of quality control over the copies that were inevitably being shared online. Doing this meant forgoing the revenue they previously got from selling digital images. But Lizzy says that was a small price to pay for all of the opportunities that sharing unlocked for them. Being Made with Creative Commons means you stop thinking about ways to artificially make your content scarce, and instead leverage it as the potentially abundant resource it is.14 When you see information abundance as a feature, not a bug, you start thinking about the ways to use the idling capacity of your content to your advantage. As my friend and colleague Eric Steuer once said, “Using CC licenses shows you get the Internet.” Cory Doctorow says it costs him nothing when other people make copies of his work, and it opens the possibility that he might get something in return.15 Similarly, the makers of the Arduino boards knew it was impossible to stop people from copying their hardware, so they decided not to even try and instead look for the benefits of being open. For them, the result is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of hardware in the world, with a thriving online community of tinkerers and innovators that have done things with their work they never could have done otherwise. There are all kinds of way to leverage the power of sharing and remix to your benefit. Here are a few.

Use CC to grow a larger audience Putting a Creative Commons license on your content won’t make it automatically go viral, but eliminating legal barriers to copying the work certainly can’t hurt the chances that your work will be shared. The CC license symbolizes that sharing is welcome. It can act as a little tap on the shoulder to those who come across the work—a nudge to copy the work if they have any inkling of doing so. All things being equal, if one piece of content has a sign that says Share and the other says Don’t Share (which is what “©” means), which do you think people are more likely to share? The Conversation is an online news site with in-depth articles written by academics who are experts on particular topics. All of the articles are CC-licensed, and they are copied and reshared on other sites by design. This proliferating effect, which they track, is a central part of the value to their academic authors who want to reach as many readers as possible. The idea that more eyeballs equates with more success is a form of the max strategy, adopted by Google and other technology companies. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the idea is simple: “Take whatever it is you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution. The other way of saying this is that since marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.”16 This strategy is what often motivates companies to make their products and services free (i.e., no cost), but the same logic applies to making content freely shareable. Because CC-licensed content is free (as in cost) and can be freely copied, CC licensing makes it even more accessible and likely to spread. If you are successful in reaching more users, readers, listeners, or other consumers of your work, you can start to benefit from the bandwagon effect. The simple fact that there are other people consuming or following your work spurs others to want to do the same.17 This is, in part, because we simply have a tendency to engage in herd behavior, but it is also because a large following is at least a partial indicator of quality or usefulness.18

Use CC to get attribution and name recognition Every Creative Commons license requires that credit be given to the author, and that reusers supply a link back to the original source of the material. CC0, not a license but a tool used to put work in the public domain, does not make attribution a legal requirement, but many communities still give credit as a matter of best practices and social norms. In fact, it is social norms, rather than the threat of legal enforcement, that most often motivate people to provide attribution and otherwise comply with the CC license terms anyway. This is the mark of any well-functioning community, within both the marketplace and the society at large.19 CC licenses reflect a set of wishes on the part of creators, and in the vast majority of circumstances, people are naturally inclined to follow those wishes. This is particularly the case for something as straightforward and consistent with basic notions of fairness as providing credit. The fact that the name of the creator follows a CC-licensed work makes the licenses an important means to develop a reputation or, in corporate speak, a brand. The drive to associate your name with your work is not just based on commercial motivations, it is fundamental to authorship. Knowledge Unlatched is a nonprofit that helps to subsidize the print production of CC-licensed academic texts by pooling contributions from libraries around the United States. The CEO, Frances Pinter, says that the Creative Commons license on the works has a huge value to authors because reputation is the most important currency for academics. Sharing with CC is a way of having the most people see and cite your work. Attribution can be about more than just receiving credit. It can also be about establishing provenance. People naturally want to know where content came from—the source of a work is sometimes just as interesting as the work itself. Opendesk is a platform for furniture designers to share their designs. Consumers who like those designs can then get matched with local makers who turn the designs into real-life furniture. The fact that I, sitting in the middle of the United States, can pick out a design created by a designer in Tokyo and then use a maker within my own community to transform the design into something tangible is part of the power of their platform. The provenance of the design is a special part of the product. Knowing the source of a work is also critical to ensuring its credibility. Just as a trademark is designed to give consumers a way to identify the source and quality of a particular good and service, knowing the author of a work gives the public a way to assess its credibility. In a time when online discourse is plagued with misinformation, being a trusted information source is more valuable than ever.

Use CC-licensed content as a marketing tool As we will cover in more detail later, many endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons make money by providing a product or service other than the CC-licensed work. Sometimes that other product or service is completely unrelated to the CC content. Other times it’s a physical copy or live performance of the CC content. In all cases, the CC content can attract people to your other product or service. Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us she has seen time and again how offering CC-licensed content—that is, digitally for free—actually increases sales of the printed goods because it functions as a marketing tool. We see this phenomenon regularly with famous artwork. The Mona Lisa is likely the most recognizable painting on the planet. Its ubiquity has the effect of catalyzing interest in seeing the painting in person, and in owning physical goods with the image. Abundant copies of the content often entice more demand, not blunt it. Another example came with the advent of the radio. Although the music industry did not see it coming (and fought it!), free music on the radio functioned as advertising for the paid version people bought in music stores.20 Free can be a form of promotion. In some cases, endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons do not even need dedicated marketing teams or marketing budgets. Cards Against Humanity is a CC-licensed card game available as a free download. And because of this (thanks to the CC license on the game), the creators say it is one of the best-marketed games in the world, and they have never spent a dime on marketing. The textbook publisher OpenStax has also avoided hiring a marketing team. Their products are free, or cheaper to buy in the case of physical copies, which makes them much more attractive to students who then demand them from their universities. They also partner with service providers who build atop the CC-licensed content and, in turn, spend money and resources marketing those services (and by extension, the OpenStax textbooks).

Use CC to enable hands-on engagement with your work The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it signifies an embrace of remix culture. Indeed, this is the great promise of digital technology. The Internet opened up a whole new world of possibilities for public participation in creative work. Four of the six CC licenses enable reusers to take apart, build upon, or otherwise adapt the work. Depending on the context, adaptation can mean wildly different things—translating, updating, localizing, improving, transforming. It enables a work to be customized for particular needs, uses, people, and communities, which is another distinct value to offer the public.21 Adaptation is more game changing in some contexts than others. With educational materials, the ability to customize and update the content is critically important for its usefulness. For photography, the ability to adapt a photo is less important. This is a way to counteract a potential downside of the abundance of free and open content described above. As Anderson wrote in Free, “People often don’t care as much about things they don’t pay for, and as a result they don’t think as much about how they consume them.”22 If even the tiny act of volition of paying one penny for something changes our perception of that thing, then surely the act of remixing it enhances our perception exponentially.23 We know that people will pay more for products they had a part in creating.24 And we know that creating something, no matter what quality, brings with it a type of creative satisfaction that can never be replaced by consuming something created by someone else.25 Actively engaging with the content helps us avoid the type of aimless consumption that anyone who has absentmindedly scrolled through their social-media feeds for an hour knows all too well. In his book, Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky says, “To participate is to act as if your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something, your response is part of the event.”26 Opening the door to your content can get people more deeply tied to your work.

Use CC to differentiate yourself Operating under a traditional copyright regime usually means operating under the rules of establishment players in the media. Business strategies that are embedded in the traditional copyright system, like using digital rights management (DRM) and signing exclusivity contracts, can tie the hands of creators, often at the expense of the creator’s best interest.27 Being Made with Creative Commons means you can function without those barriers and, in many cases, use the increased openness as a competitive advantage. David Harris from OpenStax said they specifically pursue strategies they know that traditional publishers cannot. “Don’t go into a market and play by the incumbent rules,” David said. “Change the rules of engagement.”

Making Money Like any moneymaking endeavor, those that are Made with Creative Commons have to generate some type of value for their audience or customers. Sometimes that value is subsidized by funders who are not actually beneficiaries of that value. Funders, whether philanthropic institutions, governments, or concerned individuals, provide money to the organization out of a sense of pure altruism. This is the way traditional nonprofit funding operates.28 But in many cases, the revenue streams used by endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons are directly tied to the value they generate, where the recipient is paying for the value they receive like any standard market transaction. In still other cases, rather than the quid pro quo exchange of money for value that typically drives market transactions, the recipient gives money out of a sense of reciprocity.
Most who are Made with Creative Commons use a variety of methods to bring in revenue, some market-based and some not. One common strategy is using grant funding for content creation when research-and-development costs are particularly high, and then finding a different revenue stream (or streams) for ongoing expenses. As Shirky wrote, “The trick is in knowing when markets are an optimal way of organizing interactions and when they are not.”29 Our case studies explore in more detail the various revenue-generating mechanisms used by the creators, organizations, and businesses we interviewed. There is nuance hidden within the specific ways each of them makes money, so it is a bit dangerous to generalize too much about what we learned. Nonetheless, zooming out and viewing things from a higher level of abstraction can be instructive.

Market-based revenue streams In the market, the central question when determining how to bring in revenue is what value people are willing to pay for.30 By definition, if you are Made with Creative Commons, the content you provide is available for free and not a market commodity. Like the ubiquitous freemium business model, any possible market transaction with a consumer of your content has to be based on some added value you provide.31 In many ways, this is the way of the future for all content-driven endeavors. In the market, value lives in things that are scarce. Because the Internet makes a universe of content available to all of us for free, it is difficult to get people to pay for content online. The struggling newspaper industry is a testament to this fact. This is compounded by the fact that at least some amount of copying is probably inevitable. That means you may end up competing with free versions of your own content, whether you condone it or not.32 If people can easily find your content for free, getting people to buy it will be difficult, particularly in a context where access to content is more important than owning it. In Free, Anderson wrote, “Copyright protection schemes, whether coded into either law or software, are simply holding up a price against the force of gravity.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that content-driven endeavors have no future in the traditional marketplace. In Free, Anderson explains how when one product or service becomes free, as information and content largely have in the digital age, other things become more valuable. “Every abundance creates a new scarcity,” he wrote. You just have to find some way other than the content to provide value to your audience or customers. As Anderson says, “It’s easy to compete with Free: simply offer something better or at least different from the free version.”33 In light of this reality, in some ways endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons are at a level playing field with all content-based endeavors in the digital age. In fact, they may even have an advantage because they can use the abundance of content to derive revenue from something scarce. They can also benefit from the goodwill that stems from the values behind being Made with Creative Commons.

For content creators and distributors, there are nearly infinite ways to provide value to the consumers of your work, above and beyond the value that lives within your free digital content. Often, the CC-licensed content functions as a marketing tool for the paid product or service. Here are the most common high-level categories.

Providing a custom service to consumers of your work [MARKET-BASED] In this age of information abundance, we don’t lack for content. The trick is finding content that matches our needs and wants, so customized services are particularly valuable. As Anderson wrote, “Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.”34 This can be anything from the artistic and cultural consulting services provided by Ártica to the custom-song business of Jonathan “Song-A-Day” Mann.

Charging for the physical copy [MARKET-BASED] In his book about maker culture, Anderson characterizes this model as giving away the bits and selling the atoms (where bits refers to digital content and atoms refer to a physical object).35 This is particularly successful in domains where the digital version of the content isn’t as valuable as the analog version, like book publishing where a significant subset of people still prefer reading something they can hold in their hands. Or in domains where the content isn’t useful until it is in physical form, like furniture designs. In those situations, a significant portion of consumers will pay for the convenience of having someone else put the physical version together for them. Some endeavors squeeze even more out of this revenue stream by using a Creative Commons license that only allows noncommercial uses, which means no one else can sell physical copies of their work in competition with them. This strategy of reserving commercial rights can be particularly important for items like books, where every printed copy of the same work is likely to be the same quality, so it is harder to differentiate one publishing service from another. On the other hand, for items like furniture or electronics, the provider of the physical goods can compete with other providers of the same works based on quality, service, or other traditional business principles.

Charging for the in-person version [MARKET-BASED] As anyone who has ever gone to a concert will tell you, experiencing creativity in person is a completely different experience from consuming a digital copy on your own. Far from acting as a substitute for face-to-face interaction, CC-licensed content can actually create demand for the in-person version of experience. You can see this effect when people go view original art in person or pay to attend a talk or training course. Selling merchandise [MARKET-BASED] In many cases, people who like your work will pay for products demonstrating a connection to your work. As a child of the 1980s, I can personally attest to the power of a good concert T-shirt. This can also be an important revenue stream for museums and galleries.

Sometimes the way to find a market-based revenue stream is by providing value to people other than those who consume your CC-licensed content. In these revenue streams, the free content is being subsidized by an entirely different category of people or businesses. Often, those people or businesses are paying to access your main audience. The fact that the content is free increases the size of the audience, which in turn makes the offer more valuable to the paying customers. This is a variation of a traditional business model built on free called multi-sided platforms.36 Access to your audience isn’t the only thing people are willing to pay for—there are other services you can provide as well.

Charging advertisers or sponsors [MARKET-BASED] The traditional model of subsidizing free content is advertising. In this version of multi-sided platforms, advertisers pay for the opportunity to reach the set of eyeballs the content creators provide in the form of their audience.37 The Internet has made this model more difficult because the number of potential channels available to reach those eyeballs has become essentially infinite.38 Nonetheless, it remains a viable revenue stream for many content creators, including those who are Made with Creative Commons. Often, instead of paying to display advertising, the advertiser pays to be an official sponsor of particular content or projects, or of the overall endeavor.

Charging your content creators [MARKET-BASED] Another type of multisided platform is where the content creators themselves pay to be featured on the platform. Obviously, this revenue stream is only available to those who rely on work created, at least in part, by others. The most well-known version of this model is the “author-processing charge” of open-access journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, but there are other variations. The Conversation is primarily funded by a university-membership model, where universities pay to have their faculties participate as writers of the content on the Conversation website.

Charging a transaction fee [MARKET-BASED] This is a version of a traditional business model based on brokering transactions between parties.39 Curation is an important element of this model. Platforms like the Noun Project add value by wading through CC-licensed content to curate a high-quality set and then derive revenue when creators of that content make transactions with customers. Other platforms make money when service providers transact with their customers; for example, Opendesk makes money every time someone on their site pays a maker to make furniture based on one of the designs on the platform.

Providing a service to your creators [MARKET-BASED] As mentioned above, endeavors can make money by providing customized services to their users. Platforms can undertake a variation of this service model directed at the creators that provide the content they feature. The data platforms Figure.NZ and Figshare both capitalize on this model by providing paid tools to help their users make the data they contribute to the platform more discoverable and reusable.

Licensing a trademark [MARKET-BASED] Finally, some that are Made with Creative Commons make money by selling use of their trademarks. Well known brands that consumers associate with quality, credibility, or even an ethos can license that trademark to companies that want to take advantage of that goodwill. By definition, trademarks are scarce because they represent a particular source of a good or service. Charging for the ability to use that trademark is a way of deriving revenue from something scarce while taking advantage of the abundance of CC content.

Reciprocity-based revenue streams Even if we set aside grant funding, we found that the traditional economic framework of understanding the market failed to fully capture the ways the endeavors we analyzed were making money. It was not simply about monetizing scarcity. Rather than devising a scheme to get people to pay money in exchange for some direct value provided to them, many of the revenue streams were more about providing value, building a relationship, and then eventually finding some money that flows back out of a sense of reciprocity. While some look like traditional nonprofit funding models, they aren’t charity. The endeavor exchange value with people, just not necessarily synchronously or in a way that requires that those values be equal. As David Bollier wrote in Think Like a Commoner, “There is no self-serving calculation of whether the value given and received is strictly equal.” This should be a familiar dynamic—it is the way you deal with your friends and family. We give without regard for what and when we will get back. David Bollier wrote, “Reciprocal social exchange lies at the heart of human identity, community and culture. It is a vital brain function that helps the human species survive and evolve.” What is rare is to incorporate this sort of relationship into an endeavor that also engages with the market.40 We almost can’t help but think of relationships in the market as being centered on an even-steven exchange of value.41

Memberships and individual donations [RECIPROCITY-BASED] While memberships and donations are traditional nonprofit funding models, in the Made with Creative Commons context, they are directly tied to the reciprocal relationship that is cultivated with the beneficiaries of their work. The bigger the pool of those receiving value from the content, the more likely this strategy will work, given that only a small percentage of people are likely to contribute. Since using CC licenses can grease the wheels for content to reach more people, this strategy can be more effective for endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons. The greater the argument that the content is a public good or that the entire endeavor is furthering a social mission, the more likely this strategy is to succeed.

The pay-what-you-want model [RECIPROCITY-BASED] In the pay-what-you-want model, the beneficiary of Creative Commons content is invited to give—at any amount they can and feel is appropriate, based on the public and personal value they feel is generated by the open content. Critically, these models are not touted as “buying” something free. They are similar to a tip jar. People make financial contributions as an act of gratitude. These models capitalize on the fact that we are naturally inclined to give money for things we value in the marketplace, even in situations where we could find a way to get it for free. Crowdfunding [RECIPROCITY-BASED] Crowdfunding models are based on recouping the costs of creating and distributing content before the content is created. If the endeavor is Made with Creative Commons, anyone who wants the work in question could simply wait until it’s created and then access it for free. That means, for this model to work, people have to care about more than just receiving the work. They have to want you to succeed. Amanda Palmer credits the success of her crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Patreon to the years she spent building her community and creating a connection with her fans. She wrote in The Art of Asking, “Good art is made, good art is shared, help is offered, ears are bent, emotions are exchanged, the compost of real, deep connection is sprayed all over the fields. Then one day, the artist steps up and asks for something. And if the ground has been fertilized enough, the audience says, without hesitation: of course.” Other types of crowdfunding rely on a sense of responsibility that a particular community may feel. Knowledge Unlatched pools funds from major U.S. libraries to subsidize CC-licensed academic work that will be, by definition, available to everyone for free. Libraries with bigger budgets tend to give more out of a sense of commitment to the library community and to the idea of open access generally.

Making Human Connections Regardless of how they made money, in our interviews, we repeatedly heard language like “persuading people to buy” and “inviting people to pay.” We heard it even in connection with revenue streams that sit squarely within the market. Cory Doctorow told us, “I have to convince my readers that the right thing to do is to pay me.” The founders of the for-profit company Lumen Learning showed us the letter they send to those who opt not to pay for the services they provide in connection with their CC-licensed educational content. It isn’t a cease-and-desist letter; it’s an invitation to pay because it’s the right thing to do. This sort of behavior toward what could be considered nonpaying customers is largely unheard of in the traditional marketplace. But it seems to be part of the fabric of being Made with Creative Commons. Nearly every endeavor we profiled relied, at least in part, on people being invested in what they do. The closer the Creative Commons content is to being “the product,” the more pronounced this dynamic has to be. Rather than simply selling a product or service, they are making ideological, personal, and creative connections with the people who value what they do. It took me a very long time to see how this avoidance of thinking about what they do in pure market terms was deeply tied to being Made with Creative Commons. I came to the research with preconceived notions about what Creative Commons is and what it means to be Made with Creative Commons. It turned out I was wrong on so many counts. Obviously, being Made with Creative Commons means using Creative Commons licenses. That much I knew. But in our interviews, people spoke of so much more than copyright permissions when they explained how sharing fit into what they do. I was thinking about sharing too narrowly, and as a result, I was missing vast swaths of the meaning packed within Creative Commons. Rather than parsing the specific and narrow role of the copyright license in the equation, it is important not to disaggregate the rest of what comes with sharing. You have to widen the lens. Being Made with Creative Commons is not just about the simple act of licensing a copyrighted work under a set of standardized terms, but also about community, social good, contributing ideas, expressing a value system, working together. These components of sharing are hard to cultivate if you think about what you do in purely market terms. Decent social behavior isn’t as intuitive when we are doing something that involves monetary exchange. It takes a conscious effort to foster the context for real sharing, based not strictly on impersonal market exchange, but on connections with the people with whom you share—connections with you, with your work, with your values, with each other. The rest of this section will explore some of the common strategies that creators, companies, and organizations use to remind us that there are humans behind every creative endeavor. To remind us we have obligations to each other. To remind us what sharing really looks like. Be human Humans are social animals, which means we are naturally inclined to treat each other well.42 But the further removed we are from the person with whom we are interacting, the less caring our behavior will be. While the Internet has democratized cultural production, increased access to knowledge, and connected us in extraordinary ways, it can also make it easy forget we are dealing with another human. To counteract the anonymous and impersonal tendencies of how we operate online, individual creators and corporations who use Creative Commons licenses work to demonstrate their humanity. For some, this means pouring their lives out on the page. For others, it means showing their creative process, giving a glimpse into how they do what they do. As writer Austin Kleon wrote, “Our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it.”43 A critical component to doing this effectively is not worrying about being a “brand.” That means not being afraid to be vulnerable. Amanda Palmer says, “When you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.” Not everyone is suited to live life as an open book like Palmer, and that’s OK. There are a lot of ways to be human. The trick is just avoiding pretense and the temptation to artificially craft an image. People don’t just want the glossy version of you. They can’t relate to it, at least not in a meaningful way. This advice is probably even more important for businesses and organizations because we instinctively conceive of them as nonhuman (though in the United States, corporations are people!). When corporations and organizations make the people behind them more apparent, it reminds people that they are dealing with something other than an anonymous corporate entity. In business-speak, this is about “humanizing your interactions” with the public.44 But it can’t be a gimmick. You can’t fake being human.

Be open and accountable Transparency helps people understand who you are and why you do what you do, but it also inspires trust. Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity told us, “One of the most surprising things you can do in capitalism is just be honest with people.” That means sharing the good and the bad. As Amanda Palmer wrote, “You can fix almost anything by authentically communicating.”45 It isn’t about trying to satisfy everyone or trying to sugarcoat mistakes or bad news, but instead about explaining your rationale and then being prepared to defend it when people are critical.46 Being accountable does not mean operating on consensus. According to James Surowiecki, consensus-driven groups tend to resort to lowest-common-denominator solutions and avoid the sort of candid exchange of ideas that cultivates healthy collaboration.47 Instead, it can be as simple as asking for input and then giving context and explanation about decisions you make, even if soliciting feedback and inviting discourse is time-consuming. If you don’t go through the effort to actually respond to the input you receive, it can be worse than not inviting input in the first place.48 But when you get it right, it can guarantee the type of diversity of thought that helps endeavors excel. And it is another way to get people involved and invested in what you do.

Design for the good actors Traditional economics assumes people make decisions based solely on their own economic self-interest.49 Any relatively introspective human knows this is a fiction—we are much more complicated beings with a whole range of needs, emotions, and motivations. In fact, we are hardwired to work together and ensure fairness.50 Being Made with Creative Commons requires an assumption that people will largely act on those social motivations, motivations that would be considered “irrational” in an economic sense. As Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us, “It is best to ignore people who try to scare you about free riding. That fear is based on a very shallow view of what motivates human behavior.” There will always be people who will act in purely selfish ways, but endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons design for the good actors. The assumption that people will largely do the right thing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus, “Systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.”51 When we acknowledge that people are often motivated by something other than financial self-interest, we design our endeavors in ways that encourage and accentuate our social instincts. Rather than trying to exert control over people’s behavior, this mode of operating requires a certain level of trust. We might not realize it, but our daily lives are already built on trust. As Surowiecki wrote in The Wisdom of Crowds, “It’s impossible for a society to rely on law alone to make sure citizens act honestly and responsibly. And it’s impossible for any organization to rely on contracts alone to make sure that its managers and workers live up to their obligation.” Instead, we largely trust that people—mostly strangers—will do what they are supposed to do.52 And most often, they do.

Treat humans like, well, humans For creators, treating people as humans means not treating them like fans. As Kleon says, “If you want fans, you have to be a fan first.”53 Even if you happen to be one of the few to reach celebrity levels of fame, you are better off remembering that the people who follow your work are human, too. Cory Doctorow makes a point to answer every single email someone sends him. Amanda Palmer spends vast quantities of time going online to communicate with her public, making a point to listen just as much as she talks.54 The same idea goes for businesses and organizations. Rather than automating its customer service, the music platform Tribe of Noise makes a point to ensure its employees have personal, one-on-one interaction with users. When we treat people like humans, they typically return the gift in kind. It’s called karma. But social relationships are fragile. It is all too easy to destroy them if you make the mistake of treating people as anonymous customers or free labor.55 Platforms that rely on content from contributors are especially at risk of creating an exploitative dynamic. It is important to find ways to acknowledge and pay back the value that contributors generate. That does not mean you can solve this problem by simply paying contributors for their time or contributions. As soon as we introduce money into a relationship—at least when it takes a form of paying monetary value in exchange for other value—it can dramatically change the dynamic.56

State your principles and stick to them Being Made with Creative Commons makes a statement about who you are and what you do. The symbolism is powerful. Using Creative Commons licenses demonstrates adherence to a particular belief system, which generates goodwill and connects like-minded people to your work. Sometimes people will be drawn to endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons as a way of demonstrating their own commitment to the Creative Commons value system, akin to a political statement. Other times people will identify and feel connected with an endeavor’s separate social mission. Often both. The expression of your values doesn’t have to be implicit. In fact, many of the people we interviewed talked about how important it is to state your guiding principles up front. Lumen Learning attributes a lot of their success to having been outspoken about the fundamental values that guide what they do. As a for-profit company, they think their expressed commitment to low-income students and open licensing has been critical to their credibility in the OER (open educational resources) community in which they operate. When your end goal is not about making a profit, people trust that you aren’t just trying to extract value for your own gain. People notice when you have a sense of purpose that transcends your own self-interest.57 It attracts committed employees, motivates contributors, and builds trust.

Build a community Endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons thrive when community is built around what they do. This may mean a community collaborating together to create something new, or it may simply be a collection of like-minded people who get to know each other and rally around common interests or beliefs.58 To a certain extent, simply being Made with Creative Commons automatically brings with it some element of community, by helping connect you to like-minded others who recognize and are drawn to the values symbolized by using CC. To be sustainable, though, you have to work to nurture community. People have to care—about you and each other. One critical piece to this is fostering a sense of belonging. As Jono Bacon writes in The Art of Community, “If there is no belonging, there is no community.” For Amanda Palmer and her band, that meant creating an accepting and inclusive environment where people felt a part of their “weird little family.”59 For organizations like Red Hat, that means connecting around common beliefs or goals. As the CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote in The Open Organization, “Tapping into passion is especially important in building the kinds of participative communities that drive open organizations.”60 Communities that collaborate together take deliberate planning. Surowiecki wrote, “It takes a lot of work to put the group together. It’s difficult to ensure that people are working in the group’s interest and not in their own. And when there’s a lack of trust between the members of the group (which isn’t surprising given that they don’t really know each other), considerable energy is wasted trying to determine each other’s bona fides.”61 Building true community requires giving people within the community the power to create or influence the rules that govern the community.62 If the rules are created and imposed in a top-down manner, people feel like they don’t have a voice, which in turn leads to disengagement. Community takes work, but working together, or even simply being connected around common interests or values, is in many ways what sharing is about.

Give more to the commons than you take Conventional wisdom in the marketplace dictates that people should try to extract as much money as possible from resources. This is essentially what defines so much of the so-called sharing economy. In an article on the Harvard Business Review website called “The Sharing Economy Isn’t about Sharing at All,” authors Giana Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi explained how the anonymous market-driven trans-actions in most sharing-economy businesses are purely about monetizing access.63 As Lisa Gansky put it in her book The Mesh, the primary strategy of the sharing economy is to sell the same product multiple times, by selling access rather than ownership.64 That is not sharing. Sharing requires adding as much or more value to the ecosystem than you take. You can’t simply treat open content as a free pool of resources from which to extract value. Part of giving back to the ecosystem is contributing content back to the public under CC licenses. But it doesn’t have to just be about creating content; it can be about adding value in other ways. The social blogging platform Medium provides value to its community by incentivizing good behavior, and the result is an online space with remarkably high-quality user-generated content and limited trolling.65 Opendesk contributes to its community by committing to help its designers make money, in part by actively curating and displaying their work on its platform effectively. In all cases, it is important to openly acknowledge the amount of value you add versus that which you draw on that was created by others. Being transparent about this builds credibility and shows you are a contributing player in the commons. When your endeavor is making money, that also means apportioning financial compensation in a way that reflects the value contributed by others, providing more to contributors when the value they add outweighs the value provided by you.

Involve people in what you do Thanks to the Internet, we can tap into the talents and expertise of people around the globe. Chris Anderson calls it the Long Tail of talent.66 But to make collaboration work, the group has to be effective at what it is doing, and the people within the group have to find satisfaction from being involved.67 This is easier to facilitate for some types of creative work than it is for others. Groups tied together online collaborate best when people can work independently and asynchronously, and particularly for larger groups with loose ties, when contributors can make simple improvements without a particularly heavy time commitment.68 As the success of Wikipedia demonstrates, editing an online encyclopedia is exactly the sort of activity that is perfect for massive co-creation because small, incremental edits made by a diverse range of people acting on their own are immensely valuable in the aggregate. Those same sorts of small contributions would be less useful for many other types of creative work, and people are inherently less motivated to contribute when it doesn’t appear that their efforts will make much of a difference.69 It is easy to romanticize the opportunities for global cocreation made possible by the Internet, and, indeed, the successful examples of it are truly incredible and inspiring. But in a wide range of circumstances—perhaps more often than not—community cocreation is not part of the equation, even within endeavors built on CC content. Shirky wrote, “Sometimes the value of professional work trumps the value of amateur sharing or a feeling of belonging.70 The textbook publisher OpenStax, which distributes all of its material for free under CC licensing, is an example of this dynamic. Rather than tapping the community to help cocreate their college textbooks, they invest a significant amount of time and money to develop professional content. For individual creators, where the creative work is the basis for what they do, community cocreation is only rarely a part of the picture. Even musician Amanda Palmer, who is famous for her openness and involvement with her fans, said, “The only department where I wasn’t open to input was the writing, the music itself.”71 While we tend to immediately think of cocreation and remixing when we hear the word collaboration, you can also involve others in your creative process in more informal ways, by sharing half-baked ideas and early drafts, and interacting with the public to incubate ideas and get feedback. So-called “making in public” opens the door to letting people feel more invested in your creative work.72 And it shows a nonterritorial approach to ideas and information. Stephen Covey (of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame) calls this the abundance mentality—treating ideas like something plentiful—and it can create an environment where collaboration flourishes.73 There is no one way to involve people in what you do. They key is finding a way for people to contribute on their terms, compelled by their own motivations.74 What that looks like varies wildly depending on the project. Not every endeavor that is Made with Creative Commons can be Wikipedia, but every endeavor can find ways to invite the public into what they do. The goal for any form of collaboration is to move away from thinking of consumers as passive recipients of your content and transition them into active participants.75

Notes Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 14. A preview of the book is available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation. Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2014) 68. Ibid., 55. Chris Anderson, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, reprint with new preface (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 224. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 44. Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help (New York: Grand Central, 2014), 121. Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Signal, 2012), 64. David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 70. Anderson, Makers, 66. Bryan Kramer, Shareology: How Sharing Is Powering the Human Economy (New York: Morgan James, 2016), 10. Anderson, Free, 62. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 38. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 68. Anderson, Free, 86. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 144. Anderson, Free, 123. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 70. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 124. Surowiecki says, “The measure of success of laws and contracts is how rarely they are invoked.” Anderson, Free, 44. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 23. Anderson, Free, 67. Ibid., 58. Anderson, Makers, 71. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 78. Ibid., 21. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 43. William Landes Foster, Peter Kim, and Barbara Christiansen, “Ten Nonprofit Funding Models,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2009, ssir.org/articles/entry/ten_nonprofit_funding_models. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 111. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 30. Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), 202. Anderson, Free, 71. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 97. Anderson, Makers, 107. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 89. Ibid., 92. Anderson, Free, 142. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 32. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 150. Ibid., 134. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 109. Austin Kleon, Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (New York: Workman, 2014), 93. Kramer, Shareology, 76. Palmer, Art of Asking, 252. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 145. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 203. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 80. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 25. Ibid., 31. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 112. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 124. Kleon, Show Your Work, 127. Palmer, Art of Asking, 121. Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 87. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 36. Jono Bacon, The Art of Community, 2nd ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012), 36. Palmer, Art of Asking, 98. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 34. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 200. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 29. Giana Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi, “The Sharing Economy Isn’t about Sharing at All,” Harvard Business Review (website), January 28, 2015, hbr.org/2015/01/the-sharing-economy-isnt-about-sharing-at-all. Lisa Gansky, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, reprint with new epilogue (New York: Portfolio, 2012). David Lee, “Inside Medium: An Attempt to Bring Civility to the Internet,” BBC News, March 3, 2016, www.bbc.com/news/technology-35709680. Anderson, Makers, 148. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 164. Whitehurst, foreword to Open Organization. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 144. Ibid., 154. Palmer, Art of Asking, 163. Anderson, Makers, 173. Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Potential within Us All (New York: Crown, 2013), 82. Whitehurst, foreword to Open Organization. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: Harper Business, 2010), 188.

The Creative Commons Licenses

All of the Creative Commons licenses grant a basic set of permissions. At a minimum, a CC- licensed work can be copied and shared in its original form for noncommercial purposes so long as attribution is given to the creator. There are six licenses in the CC license suite that build on that basic set of permissions, ranging from the most restrictive (allowing only those basic permissions to share unmodified copies for noncommercial purposes) to the most permissive (reusers can do anything they want with the work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they give the creator credit). The licenses are built on copyright and do not cover other types of rights that creators might have in their works, like patents or trademarks. Here are the six licenses:

The Attribution license (CC BY) lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

The Attribution-Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA) lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

The Attribution-NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND) allows for redistribution, commercial and noncommercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged with credit to you.

The Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC) lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially. Although their new works must also acknowledge you, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA) lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the same terms.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND) is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them or use them commercially.

In addition to these six licenses, Creative Commons has two public-domain tools—one for creators and the other for those who manage collections of existing works by authors whose terms of copyright have expired:

CC0 enables authors and copyright owners to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain (“no rights reserved”).

The Creative Commons Public Domain Mark facilitates the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions.

In our case studies, some use just one Creative Commons license, others use several. Attribution (found in thirteen case studies) and Attribution-ShareAlike (found in eight studies) were the most common, with the other licenses coming up in four or so case studies, including the public-domain tool CC0. Some of the organizations we profiled offer both digital content and software: by using open-source-software licenses for the software code and Creative Commons licenses for digital content, they amplify their involvement with and commitment to sharing. There is a popular misconception that the three NonCommercial licenses offered by CC are the only options for those who want to make money off their work. As we hope this book makes clear, there are many ways to make endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons sustainable. Reserving commercial rights is only one of those ways. It is certainly true that a license that allows others to make commercial use of your work (CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC BY-ND) forecloses some traditional revenue streams. If you apply an Attribution (CC BY) license to your book, you can’t force a film company to pay you royalties if they turn your book into a feature-length film, or prevent another company from selling physical copies of your work. The decision to choose a NonCommercial and/or NoDerivs license comes down to how much you need to retain control over the creative work. The NonCommercial and NoDerivs licenses are ways of reserving some significant portion of the exclusive bundle of rights that copyright grants to creators. In some cases, reserving those rights is important to how you bring in revenue. In other cases, creators use a NonCommercial or NoDerivs license because they can’t give up on the dream of hitting the creative jackpot. The music platform Tribe of Noise told us the NonCommercial licenses were popular among their users because people still held out the dream of having a major record label discover their work. Other times the decision to use a more restrictive license is due to a concern about the integrity of the work. For example, the nonprofit TeachAIDS uses a NoDerivs license for its educational materials because the medical subject matter is particularly important to get right. There is no one right way. The NonCommercial and NoDerivs restrictions reflect the values and preferences of creators about how their creative work should be reused, just as the ShareAlike license reflects a different set of values, one that is less about controlling access to their own work and more about ensuring that whatever gets created with their work is available to all on the same terms. Since the beginning of the commons, people have been setting up structures that helped regulate the way in which shared resources were used. The CC licenses are an attempt to standardize norms across all domains. Note For more about the licenses including examples and tips on sharing your work in the digital commons, start with the Creative Commons page called “Share Your Work” at creativecommons.org/share-your-work/.

Links

|Next | Previous | Index |