How to Understand Content Licensing
Vince Thompson: Hi! Welcome to Dog & Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. In the battle
for content ideas and copyrights, content creators are often left
confused and vulnerable to exploitation. Eric Steuer, Creative
Director of Creative Commons is helping to guide the creative
world towards a more free and balanced system of content
licensing. Creative Commons, we're seeing it on websites. We
know a little bit about it. Can you help explain?
Eric Steuer: Creative Commons is an organization. It's a nonprofit organization
that is built around the idea of supporting and enabling sharing and
reuse especially on the internet. The main project of Creative
Commons, the thing that we do is provide this free public
copyright licenses.
Vince Thompson: This allows content producers to giveaway some of their rights but
not all of their rights?
Eric Steuer: Right. It's not about everything being, you know, free all the time
to everyone. It's about giving people choices, a way to easily take
advantage of the spectrum of copyright and there are definitely
instances that the law sort of gets in the way and becomes
something that is either not clear or it's too prohibitive. This is an
easy way for people to mark the work with the freedom that they
want to carry.
Vince Thompson: What do I do? How do I get started?
Eric Steuer: So the whole process of Creative Commons' licensing is meant to
be incredibly simple. So one thing you could do is come to our
site, creativecommons.org. There's a tool -- there's a link to it right
in the front site. It says License. You go there and it basically is a
wizard that asks you a very few questions and based on those
answers, it comes up with a license. The questions are things like,
"Do you want people to make commercial use out of this or just
noncommercial use?
Give them the right to make derivative works out of this work or
can they not do that." So stuff like that. I think the way that most
people use Creative Commons is because the tools are also built
into other publishing platforms. So community publishing sites
like Flicker for instance, is a great resource for Creative Commons
material because in the same place that you title your photo or give
it tags and add all the other information to it that you do, it asks
you about Creative Commons licenses.
Do you want to have a Creative Commons license to it -- attached
to this? If so, which one? Which permissions could be people have,
and because it's right there in that interface, we see that people use
it, you know, to a sort of incredible degree there.
Vince Thompson: So because you arrived at this apex point of licensing content, you
really get a pretty good beat on what's happening in the content
world. What are you seeing?
Eric Steuer: People are doing amazing things that are inspired by what other
people have done. So we work in that in the very literal sense
because we provide, you know, these tools, allow people to take
what someone literally has created and use it in new ways.
Vince Thompson: So how did the organization get started?
Eric Steuer: A group of academics and entrepreneurs and lawyers got together
and said, "Well, there needs to be something that helps people
navigates these very complicated waters that -- that helps build a
digital common, something that's analogous to the sort of
commons you see in the real world, things that are publicly
available resources. It was sort of in a stuttering major way
inspired by the GPL, the General Public License which is used for
software and it's something that was really integral to the
development of open source software.
Vince Thompson: How can the public help support Creative Commons?
Eric Steuer: That's one of the stuttering, you know, major components of how
we operate financially is that the public who sees that the work that
we do is being important comes out and they help us by donating
money to us. You can always obviously donate money to Creative
Commons and there's ways to do that on our site but we are really
making a specific drive in the last couple of months of the year,
every year to -- to raise some money but I think that it's also
important to let people know that -- that supporting Creative
Commons is not just something that you do financially that really
and what we're trying to do is build the commons, make it as big
and as vibrant and is filled with different types of -- of quality
material as possible.
Vince Thompson: Talk a little bit about your history. It sounds like you are a reporter
who became part of the story.
Eric Steuer: A little bit. Yeah. I was working at Wired as an editor and we were
doing a story about Creative Commons but that story essentially
became a package, a series of stories about -- about Creative
Commons, about sort of associated concepts and things that were
happening in various industries. We put together a CD that came
with every issue where all of the tracks for Creative Commons
license. I helped with that together with a couple of great people at
Wired and from there, it just got more and more interesting what
Creative Commons is doing. I had met the people who -- who had
started and were continuing the work there through this story and
eventually, I was lucky enough to -- to get to work for Creative
Commons as a Creative Director.
Vince Thompson: Eric Steuer, Creative Director at creativecommons.org. Thanks so
much for being with us. As always, if you have questions, ideas,
you'd like to suggest to guest, please do so. You can email us at
info@dogandpony.com.
I'm Vince Thompson. Thanks for watching.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services