Creative Commons is in the midst of its annual fundraising drive, and Hindawi, the open access scholarly journal, will match your contribution, up to $3,000. Creative Commons is an astonishingly clever and effective legal hack, a way of allowing people to choose to work with the Internet and its innate capacity to share culture, even if our governments continue to pass laws in the service of old economy thugs who think that universal access to human knowledge is a bug, not a feature. Here’s Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s pitch for why you should support CC:
Why do you support CC and why do you use it on your sites?
I have always been a fan of CC’s approach as a “middle way.” For a long time, we were stuck in a debate about copyright that focused only on two categories of people: the creators who want to maintain their work under traditional copyright, and the “pirates” who want to steal that work and undermine it. What was lost in that dialogue first became obvious in the world of free, open source software: many people are creators but aren’t interested in, nor helped by, traditional copyright. CC recognized that the solutions being created in the world of software had broader applicability to culture.
What, in your opinion, are the challenges that lie ahead for CC?
Billions of people benefit in some way from the work of Creative Commons, but I fear that it is too often overlooked because the work is by nature free of charge, and because it is “infrastructure.”
At Wikipedia, we are able to fund-raise directly from small donors because we are huge, public, and visible, and our community builds something that everyone uses every day. With Wikipedia, we can always know that there will be lots and lots of $30 donors from the heart and soul of the Wikipedia donor community. It’s harder for Creative Commons.
I’m a donor to Creative Commons, and I encourage other people to be donors as well. Creative Commons will always have a smaller group of donors, but one that digs deeper because they know how important the work is.