I'm thrilled to report that today Medium has launched explicit Creative Commons licensing as part of the product. That means when you post a story to Medium, you can simply click to select a CC license for whatever you write!
Medium's direct efforts to encourage the free flow and sharing of stories and ideas is yet another reason why I'm proud to be part of the company. We launched our Creative Commons feature with a series of great posts:
• Matthew Lew put together a beautiful visual treatment of Cory's Lockdown, a piece — appropriately enough — about DRM and copyright, originally published in 2012 here on Boing Boing.
• Our photo-journalism publication, Vantage, took images of insects put into the public domain by The University of Texas using the CC0 copyright waiver to create Unleashing the Swarm.
• Marcin Wichary posted George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, which is in the public domain.
And here's what Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig wrote in his post about the project:
To anyone who knows Medium (and the innovators behind its birth), this is not a surprise. Medium has captured something powerful about the way creativity in today’s web can be shared. And by embracing Creative Commons licenses, it stakes its commitment to the idea that it is the authors who should be able to choose just how freely they want their work to be shared. Medium thereby marks itself as not yet another island of creativity on the Net, but as a platform that encourages people to create and share across the many islands that the Internet has become. That encouragement will help keep the Net as it was born: a platform that encourages sharing, now with the simple ability for authors to say, “Of course, share this too.”
Congratulations (and thank you) to my Medium colleagues Jamie Talbot, Sarah Agudo, Marcin Wichary, and the Dream Factory!
