Share, reuse, and remix — legally... And help celebrate a birthday

"Creative Commons provides free tools for authors, artists, and educators to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. Our tools change "All Rights Reserved" into "Some Rights Reserved" — as the creator chooses. We are a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free."

I am quoting their website, but I think they would approve. While some people have debated the need for additional mechanisms for what is essentially a copyright, this mechanism begins with a bias for the common good. - That creators want their ideas to be used and built upon. I have watched the idea spread, like good ideas should be enabled to do, over the last few years. When I checked in at their website on what rights I had under a document I was reading I found that they and their method of licensing is turning four on December 15th! If you have an interest, and we all do in expanding "the commons" and without even slipping into a discussion of theology, I am going to pass the collection plate for them. Check out their website (click on the logo) but notice they are trying to raise some money for their efforts.

What relevance to development? Well, there is plenty. I was just reading a study on conflict zones and land pressures here in Ghana, and it was published under a "Attribution-Share Alike 2.5" license by Creative Commons. I will save that document for a future post, or for our Wiki, but it is important to note that development is often stifled by the lack of access to good information. Now we not can blame that on the evils of copyright alone, but some development agencies have looked specifically at that problem, and it bring up a great topic for this blog for future posts in terms of "knowledge management," but I have noticed a few development agencies getting over their natural tendencies to compete and keep methods and techniques proprietary, and some have actually adopted Creative Commons licenses for their publications. Hopefully we can stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again, if we can focus on sharing what works, what are best practices or what have you that can help the have nots.

For our Wiki I just chose a GNU license, or a copyleft for free documentation, and so far nothing for this blog... I picked GNU because it is generally used for open source software and I am more familiar with it for that reason. But Creative Commons is more flexible and the logo is much more attractive don't you think?

We have a least two attorneys in our group, one from the Philippines and the other from Thailand - maybe one of you would like to compare these ways (or one other possibilities at OSI) of keeping our content free, and give us an opinion, pro bono publico of course, of what works best? We can probably survive without any of these, but the alternative of letting me pick based on the logo design should scare someone to action here.

Maybe there is someone out there with an interest in how Catholic social teaching might inform this choice too. Perhaps it is too much of stretch, but there was a short but section in David Hollenbach's book that we read for Dr. Chris Vogt's course, The Common Good and Christian Ethics, (p.208-210, available in electronic form), is his chapter, Poverty, Justice and the Good of the City, related to this topic:

The cultural context of today's electronic and information-shaped society sets significant obstacles to the ethos of solidarity ... A knowledge based economy rewards those who can creatively negotiate the world of technology and information. Knowledge and technological creativity are resources that people possess in the inner domains of their consciousness. This easily leads to identifying the conditions of success with the "self " who possess them. In earlier agricultural or industrial societies the resources need for success, such as land or inherited money, were more distinguishable from the persons possessing them. Thus success was more readily seen as dependent on conditions and circumstances that one did not create oneself. Today however people with greater knowledge and skill easily see themselves as earning greater rewards strictly on their own. Well educated members of the middle class come to regard themselves entitled to the kinds of lives they lead, while many of the urban poor are seen as undeserving.

Hollenbach goes on to quote Pope John Paul II, in a reference to Centesimus Annus, no. 32, in saying that entrepreneurial success is never a solo activity. It "requires the cooperation of many people working toward a common goal ... Success is not generated by solitary creative acts." Hollenbach later explains that there is no isolated contribution to the greater good that doesn't rely on knowledge and skills that the current innovator had no role in creating. "Resources and skills," he says,are not purely the private possession of anyone. They are meant to be in service to others." It sounds like a a moral argument for share, reuse and remix to me.

While technology can be a help to level access for some, across both the developing and developed world's the trend seems to be moving more generally toward decreasing people's access to to information and toward privatization of airways radio spectrum and of public goods used to communicate. Specifically in the access of information as measured by copyright restrictions we see a similar trend. The Open Societies Institute in their study called,
Copyright and Access to Knowledge; Policy Recommendations on Flexibilities in Copyright, Laws, examined Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, India China and other countries that significantly "expanded the scope of copyright protection—that is, the works to be protected and the rights accorded to copyright owners—beyond what is required by the international copyright treaties they have acceded to. In addition, they have not incorporated all the available limitations and exceptions that would have opened up access to knowledge".