Source: Katie Scott – Wired

This article forms part of Wired.co.uk’s Creative Commons Week, which
sees a range of articles published on the topics of CC licensing,
as well as the past, present and future of the Creative Commons
movement.

Creative Commons is like a social network, claims Joi Ito, the organisation’s former
CEO and current chairman of the board, “once enough people start to
use it, it will start to spread” and spread
exponentially.

The adoption curve for the licensing
model shows use has doubled every 18 months or so, and this,
says Ito, has been steady for the last five years. Creative Commons
is now at “critical mass”, he claims, but argues that the average
person still doesn’t know what it is. Success will be marked by
Creative Commons content appearing at the top of search results
provided by the likes of Google and Yahoo, because that will happen
when people know exactly what it is — and want to find it. “We’re
not there yet but we should be soon”, he says.

We caught Ito inbetween flights. He is now
Director of MIT’s Media Lab, and sits on the boards of the
Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices. This is alongside
being an early investor in Last.fm, Kickstarter, Twitter and Flickr
— the latter, which is now a huge repository for Creative Commons
imagery. It is with his MIT hat on that
he chooses what he believes will be a big growth area for Creative
Commons — academic publications. He also has a personal interest
in open hardware. “I think what’s happening in this area is really
similar to what opened with open source. It could really lower the
innovation cost of hardware and allow startups to create hardware
when, right now, it tends to be dominated by the big companies,” he
says.

However, even in areas where there has been huge Creative
Commons uptake, there are still detractors, he admits. Among
photographers, specifically
amateur photographers, there is now massive support for the CC
licensing model. It is now starting to filter upwards with image
library Getty Images starting to look at Creative Commons licenses
for non-commercial images. Says Ito: “This seems to be a licence
that allows photographers to benefit commercially while still using
the internet to promote their work. I think the savvier amongst
photographers are figuring out that that makes sense.”

Some professionals remain sceptical. Ito acknowledges:
“More and more photographers are starting to understand the value
but there will always be those who believe that for every free
photograph that somebody shares, there’s one that they’re not
selling. Photographers who are very pro-Creative Commons tend to be
those who are publishing books and tools.”

He argues that the model has simply become a scapegoat
with photographers blaming it for falling magazine commissions.
“There is also a lot of irrational mythology what the real cause of
the present copyright difficulties are. I know that the media
business, for example, is tough these days and that budgets are
getting cut, and it’s not just because of Creative Commons
licensing. A lot of this is just being caused by the economics of
the internet,” he states. And he is confident that education will
bring more to Creative Commons across genres.

Some of the organisations that traditionally seemed pitted
against Creative Commons are now happy to sit at the table. The Motion Picture Association and Recording Industry Association of
America “have become much more moderate”, says Ito. “In the
recent hearings at the National Academy in the US, both
organisations were supportive of the idea that artists should
have choice, which is a departure from their original, much more
extreme mantra.”

But he states that the debate over intellectual copyright
can still feel “like the Arab Israeli conflict at some level”. He
points to two US bills — SOPA
(Stop Online Piracy Act) and the Protect IP
Act — as forms of “copyright extremism” and claim that their
backers are the people coming up with the “somewhat irrational”
arguments against Creative Commons.

Although perhaps slightly war-scarred and wary, Ito
remains confident and optimistic. “The rational people seem to be
at the same table as us and we then work on the extremists on both
sides. We’re moving forward but every once in a while, there are a
few steps back”, he concludes.