Bits are meant to be free – the Creative Commons Licenses

As of now, all content on this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. In simple terms: you can do whatever you want with all text I write, you just have to leave a little attribution. The Creative Commons license is meant to solve a few issues with media distribution.

The cost of replicating media has gone downhill very fast. Currently you can copy pretty much anything for almost nothing. Want a new piece of music to play? Just download it from your favorite site. A copy of the music is places on your harddrive, the only thing you need to pay is the Internet connection and your hard disc space. But this is nearly nothing if you average it out over all the media you have on your PC.

The same goes for movies, games, programs, text and we’re even seeing the advent of custom 3D fabbing. It’s pretty expensive and exclusive for now, but give it a few years and you might be surprised how cheap it can get.

The most obvious consequence of this, is piracy and counterfeit. Historically most companies have tried to fight this be trying to block any such attempts. Software companies have added serial numbers to be entered and sites to be contacted. CD manufactures added holograms. And so on.

Many of those measures have backfired. Most recently there was a lot of talk about the Spore DRM. Honest customers aren’t happy. They are being treated as criminals, while the real criminals remove all those annoying measures. So they are in fact less bothered by it than some one who actually payed for the package.

In this regard, Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas has left a big impression on me. He argues to find ways to make money with creativity without being bound to one specific carrier. Don’t make money with CD sales, give great concerts that people will pay for. Don’t make money with a membership-only website, make it with the consultancy jobs you’ll get through that website. Don’t make money by offering downloads, make it by offering a unique and easy to use way for people to download. Offer an experience, not a product.

It might not be perfect, but I think it’s the way to go. Obviously, I do this as a hobby, so it’s a lot easier for me to say this. But there are professionals who haven’t done worse because they shared their work. My pet example is Cory Doctorow. He uses the “Noncommercial” version of the license, but me, I don’t mind that you use my content to gain money. If you can make more money with this content, it just means you’re smarter than me. I do want a mention of the origins though (“Attribution”) and I want to convince the world this is the right thing to do, hence the “Share alike”.

If you are using WordPress, there’s a plugin that is helpful, although it doesn’t seem to work for my feed. I’m not sure why, so if you can help, please let me know.

Image source.