My Open Licensing Journey

Today, I relicensed all of my photos on Flickr from CC BY-NC-SA to CC BY. In English, that means that you may reuse, redistribute, remix, and even resell any of my Flickr photos as long as you give me credit.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but hadn’t, mostly due to laziness. Flickr has a batch relicensing feature, but it failed on my 12,000 photos, so I had to do this mostly manually, which was a pain. I also plan on embedding the license in the pictures themselves from this point forward using Jeffrey Friedl’s Creative Commons Lightroom plugin. I had already done this for my Instagram photos using Philip Neustrom’s clever service, i-am-cc.org.

Why now? It was some combination of me working on my photography workflow today, thinking about licensing for Faster Than 20, and thinking about Aaron Swartz, who died one year ago.

Why do this at all? In general, I’m trying to make the world a better place. I believe that sharing my knowledge artifacts can help with that, but others need to be able to reuse that knowledge. The fewer barriers I create, the easier it is for others to do that. I also believe that doing this is better for me financially, that I am likely to make more money over time by giving away my knowledge than I would by trying to restrict it.

I’ve always been a strong advocate for open licensing, and I’ve always favored less restrictive licenses in theory. But when I first had to choose a license for my photos, I hedged, and I placed a “non-commercial, share-alike” restriction.

In practice, this has worked swimmingly for me. The only problem I’ve had is that non-commercial licenses are incompatible with Wikimedia. When I’ve wanted to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, or when someone has requested that I do, I’ve simply relicensed those particular pictures. That’s worked fine, but it hasn’t been ideal, and I’ve been wanting to get more active on Commons recently, which is a large part of why I’ve been wanting to relicense my content.

My reasons for relicensing, however, run much deeper than these minor roadblocks. It represents my ongoing journey of getting comfortable with giving up control, which speaks to where I am with Faster Than 20’s licensing.

I have long enjoyed the merits of open licensed content, and I’ve always been comfortable licensing my content that way. I’m not naive about the downsides. About a year after I published my first book (in 1996, predating Creative Commons by five years), I found a pirated version on the Internet. I would have been fine with that — it hadn’t sold well, and I wanted people to have access to the content — except that this person had replaced my name with his.

Even after I started open licensing everything, I’ve seen plenty of my content repurposed in ways that violate the already liberal licensing terms. I never feel great about it, but I the benefits have far outweighed the downsides, and it’s not like others have made millions off of my content.

Still, it takes a bit of faith to trust that the upsides will far outweigh the downsides. Over time, I’ve gotten more comfortable with this, and I’m wanting to be more liberal with my licenses.

My current thinking is to license all written content published on Faster Than 20 as CC0 — essentially public domain. In other words, I would be giving up all copyright and all associated rights for content written on Faster Than 20. I would accompany the license with a statement of how I’d like people to engage with the content, but I won’t require it.

I’ve been particularly persuaded by what Mike Linksvayer has been writing about CC0 and the whole suite of new CC licenses. At minimum, I’d like attribution, but who am I kidding? People attribute because they think it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re worried about me coming after them. I can be more explicit and more effective about what I want by inviting people rather than by relying on a license.

Why not release my photos under a CC0 license also? I could blame it on Flickr not offering that option (Flickr’s support for CC-licensed content is seriously lagging), but the reality is that I don’t want to. With pictures, I not only have a responsibility to myself, but also to my subjects. I’m not ready to give up all copyright and renouncing all control.

Blue Oxen Barnstars

I just started a podcast over at the Blue Oxen Associates web site entitled, Blue Oxen Barnstars. The name comes from the Wiki notion of Barnstars, and it’s an opportunity for me to tell the stories of people doing remarkable collaborative work in my community. The first episode is with Jeff Conklin, whom I have mentioned many, many times here. Take a listen!    (N5G)

I had a great time putting the podcast together, and now that I have the basic mechanics of it down, and I plan on doing it often. The tools that are available for this are amazing. I used the Open Source Audacity for the sound editing, and I used Creative Commons music recommended by Paul Youlten.    (N5H)

While you’re over there, I’d encourage you to subscribe to the Blue Oxen blog, as I’m starting to post many of my stories and insights into collaboration over there.    (N5I)

Video Interview at WikiSym 2006

Morten Blaabjerg, a Danish filmmaker, interviewed me at WikiSym last month and released the raw video under a Creative Commons license. I uploaded a compressed version of the interview (54MB) to Internet Archive. The interview runs about 12 minutes and covers a range of topics: Blue Oxen Associates, Wicked Problems, Wikis, and HyperScope. It’s a pretty good snapshot of what’s in my head these days.    (L6M)

WikiMania 2006, Day One

Day one is over. Brain is overloaded. Very tired. Attending conference during day/evening, then working late into night — bad. Law school dorms with no air conditioning in Cambridge in August — also bad.    (KWO)

Still, much to share. And amazingly enough, I will — at least a bit. There’s something about this conference that actually gets me to blog, rather than simply promising I will. Besides, I’m going to set a new record for responsiveness to Tom Maddox, even if it is via blog.    (KWP)

It is incredibly surreal to be back at my alma mater surrounded by post-college friends and colleagues. What makes it even more surreal is that folks from all facets of my professional life seem to be here, not just Wiki folks. I mentioned having my fingers in a lot of pies, right? Well, all those pies are unexpectedly well represented this weekend. It started yesterday when I discovered that Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were on the same flight to Boston, and culminated at dinner with Greg Elin (whom I first met at the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and who invited me to join him for dinner), Daniel Perry (a lawyer who’s been an important contributor to recent Identity Commons discussions), Tom Munnecke (first introduced to me by Jack Park when I was just starting Blue Oxen Associates), and Doc Searls (who needs no introduction). Also at the dinner: Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry, David Isenberg, Britt Blaser, and Yochai Benkler. Quite a contrast from last year, when I was hanging with grassroots Wiki peeps every night. I’m not complaining, though. The conversation was fascinating, even if we didn’t talk much about Wikis.    (KWQ)

Keeping with this theme, I didn’t hear much about Wikis today, other than my interview with Ward Cunningham. I kept my questions pretty basic, as a lot of folks there had never heard him speak, but I managed to slip in a few probing questions for myself. I asked Ward about the evolution of Wiki culture, and I specifically mentioned the culture of anonymity that he strongly encouraged in the early days, but that seems mostly absent in today’s Wikis. Ward seemed resignedly ambivalent. I asked him about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he was decidedly agnostic in his response: anything that facilitates a permissive spirit and mode of collaboration. I’m not sure whether he was being political or whether he truly feels this way. My guess is a bit of both, but I’ll press him on this if I get a chance later this weekend.    (KWR)

I showed up late to Larry Lessig‘s keynote, but I was unconcerned, as I had heard him give his Free Culture speech before. It’s excellent, but he recycles it often. Sure enough, he was doing the same speech, and I started tuning out. Fortunately, my brain was paying partial attention, or I would have missed what may end up being the most intriguing development of the conference.    (KWS)

Larry started talking about the interoperability of licenses, and how it was silly that the FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA licenses could not be relicensed interchangeably, even though the two licenses were equivalent in spirit and intent. He then proposed an interoperability clause as well as a neutral organization whose purpose would be to classify equivalent licenses. His talk was followed by a really good panel discussion between him and Eben Moglen. This stuff is really complicated and important, but it looks like Larry and Eben are serious about working together towards a common solution. Apparently, Jimbo Wales deserves a lot of credit for getting these two to cooperate. Did I mention that I love this community?    (KWT)

Quick hits:    (KWU)

  • I shared a flight and T ride here with Chris Messina aned Tara Hunt. (Chris was presenting on Bar Camp.) Chris extolled the virtues of Voodoo Pad, which apparently has autolinking features a la my Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki idea.    (KWV)
  • Was excited to see two of my roommates from last year: Kurt Jansson, a German doctoral student and president of the German chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, and Juan David Ruiz, a Chilean lawyer.    (KWW)
  • Saw Erik Zachte in the morning, who does awesome Wikipedia work. Erik immediately told me about two cool projects I had never heard of: FON and Wikimapia.    (KWX)
  • Caught up with Rory O’Connor after my session with Ward. Rory’s a filmmaker who came to last year’s Wikimania to make a documentary on Wikipedia. What I didn’t know was that he was so inspired by the proceedings, he decided to release all 13 hours of his footage under a Creative Commons license to encourage folks to mix their own documentaries from the event. Check it out, and mix away! There’s some interview footage of me somewhere in there, and I make a cameo in Rory’s 11-minute rough cut, in the background of Jimbo’s interviews yukking it up with John Breslin.    (KWY)
  • Somehow, I got recruited by multiple Wikipedians to help with the lightning talks due to my process expertise. My expert advice: “Move those chairs into a circle, and be firm with the time limit.” Yes folks, this is why I get paid the big bucks.    (KWZ)
  • Briefly got a chance to chat with Tim Starling about the OpenID integration in Mediawiki. Tim explained that they’re going to unify the user databases across all the different Wikimedia properties. This was further validation that Yoke‘s identity proxy approach is useful. Of course, one of these days, I’m going to have to actually write down what that approach is, so that I can convince people of its utility.    (KX0)

Social Implications of Data Sharing

A few weeks ago, Evan Henshaw-Plath was explaining to me his epiphany about 43people, where an aggregation of different services tied together by Social Networks was starting to look very compelling. He then said that the next natural step for the folks at The Robot Co-op was calendaring. If anyone knows about calendaring, it’s Evan, who started a calendaring company with Kellan Elliott-McCrea in a past life. (Evan, you need Purple Numbers in your blog. Everyone needs them, dammit!) Trying to find relevant event information works much better when tied to Social Networks. Folks are starting to recognize this en masse, and the industry is reacting accordingly.    (JV3)

In an ideal world, Social Networks wouldn’t be tied to a particular site. Instead, that information would be distributed, and users would control the distribution. I’d love to tie my Google searches with my social network profile at LinkedIn, for example. That’s not going to happen unless Google acquires LinkedIn, or unless there are specs and a culture for distributed data sharing.    (JV4)

The culture is the tricky part. For as long as I’ve known him, Ross Mayfield has had an email signature that says what recipients are allowed to do with that email. (The choices are “bloggable,” “ask first,” and “private.” I think “ask first” is his default.) That, my friends, is a link contract.    (JV5)

Andy Dale has been working on the technical details of distributed data sharing with his XDI work. XDI is hairy stuff, but it’s graspable. Recently, Andy blogged about the form that link contracts and data sharing agreements might take. Victor Grey has said many times that we need a Creative Commons for data sharing agreements — simple, understandable, reusable, and legally enforceable contracts for our data.    (JV6)

That’s just a start. What will the user interface for specifying these agreements look like? Will users pay any more attention to these then they already do to Terms of Agreement on web sites?    (JV7)