Eric Steuer: A License to Share

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>> 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 -- 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 wanna 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 navigate 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 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.

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