Supporting Creative Commons

Lawrence Lessig has put out a call to make a donation to support Creative Commons. From his request:

About 8 years ago, a bunch of us started thinking about how we might make the current system of copyright work better. We wanted a voluntary system that would give people a simple way to signal the freedom they wanted their creative work to carry, so their work would say legally what most took the Net to say implicitly — share this. The result was Creative Commons, born December 16, 2002.

None of us imagined then just how quickly the idea would spread. Parallel projects have been launched in over 50 countries around the world, and hundreds of millions of digital objects now live on the Net free to be (legally) shared. CC has become essential infrastructure for the sharing economy of the web — used by an incredible range of creators and entities, from the White House to Wikipedia, from Nine Inch Nails to David Byrne.

They have raised almost $40,000 but their goal is $50,000. They are looking to boost their infrastructure which was originally set up 8 years ago when they were not anticipating so much use of Creative Commons.

I don’t know about you, but I rely heavily on Creative Commons. I often use images made available on Flickr under Creative Commons in my work including blog posts and presentations. If you have read my blog posts or seen my presentations, you have benefited as well. And I often release my work (especially presentations on Slideshare) under Creative Commons. This has allowed me to make my work more available than what otherwise would be possible with existing copyright law. It also means people don’t have to contact me to request permission to use my work, reducing administrative work on my part. It encourages others to spread and share my work around, raising my profile.

So, Creative Commons is very important to me. How have you benefitted?